It is all over the news. Millions of books are collected, cut up, scanned and destroyed. It is difficult to imagine a better Bond or Marvel villain than this.

Given the document that has been leaked - can you imagine the conversations taking place in the rooms at the same time?

If you can imagine a world where all knowledge is owned and controlled - what other ways of making voices invisible could you imagine?

Would we even notice if we were being silenced?

Platforms and algorithms already decide what we are exposed to. Right now, LinkedIn is rolling out a feature where users can flag posts as “AI slop”, which means they will be prioritized lower in the feed.

You have no idea who is flagging you, or why.

On Substack, you can use a button to see whether an article was written by a human or with the help of AI.

Would there be a more effective way to silence uncomfortable voices than to claim they are AI? Fragile voices, angry voices, voices with different opinions?

It would be an easy instruction to add to the code. “If this type of content appears, flag it as AI.”

Would you trust that label? What AI says about what is AI?

The Bond villain would love this. A perfect way to silence. No bans. No obvious opponent. It is enough that someone becomes a little less visible, a little less credible. We do the work ourselves.

How can you know that the voice you never see even exists?

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This field note is part of a larger exploration that is slowly becoming a book. If it resonated with you, you can support the work by pre-ordering it. Every pre-order gives me a little more time and courage to keep following these questions.

He was impossible to resist. Charismatic, powerful and driven, he came with promises of a better life.. He seemed to have everything under control, knew exactly what he wanted and exactly how to get it. The second his eyes met mine, I was lost.

His immaculate clothes, his smile, his voice and oh, the way he smelled - were intoxicating. He moved through every room as if he belonged there. Always chasing something bigger, he could sell anything to anyone. His speed pulled everyone else along with him.

He lulled me into a sense of security, and I loved it. Everything felt so easy. We travelled the world, ate whatever we wanted, surrounded ourselves with like-minded people, and bought ourselves a beautiful life.

We had very few worries, yet somehow I felt empty. I was living in his world and had no time left for myself. My body ached from ignoring my own ways of understanding the world, my own needs and rhythms.

When I picked up an old journal, it whispered of something I had forgotten. I began hiding in weekends, holidays and Christmases, those brief moments when time slowed down and I could recover some sense of balance. I longed to be outside. I wandered through forests and sat by the sea.

But everyday life returned, and with it my longing for his attention, his smile and his approval. That was how he worked. He didn’t force me to do anything. He drew me in.

Over the years we spent together, he had quietly made himself at home everywhere: in workplaces, schools, legal systems and civic institutions. It was as if he couldn’t help himself. I knew something wasn’t right, but I wanted him, and the cost of questioning him always seemed too high.

I accepted things I would never have wanted a friend to accept. I let my worth be measured by what I did for him instead of who I was.

Then a memory returns. The buffet table was full of food meant for everyone. He walked over and took all the salmon, along with what was left of the most expensive cheese, without a second thought. I saw the looks on people’s faces. Everyone knew it was wrong. They exchanged glances, but no one said anything.

Somehow, he had convinced us that there was something admirable about it. About daring to take more than your share. About winning. About never being the one who loses. And in that confusion, or perhaps that seduction, we stayed silent.

It took me a long time to understand what had actually happened. There was no dramatic awakening, only a slow and weary realization. That I had shaped myself around someone who had never made room for who I really was. That what I had called security was really dependence. And that what I believed was care was actually a form of control that never stopped to ask how I was doing.

And once I saw it, there was no going back.

When our conflicts began, he dismissed every accusation of exploitation or stepping on others to get ahead. “Everyone does it,” he would say. He never really listened to what I had to say. Instead, he withdrew, became determined to prove himself, and only grew worse.

We went through a separation, and I went through the many stages of grief. I needed to understand before I was ready to forgive.

I closed my eyes and imagined him as a child, before he had learned what supposedly gives a person value and pride.

I tried to see his father, and how he had taught him - not through words but through example - that safety comes through control, and that the person who owns the most is also the one who has succeeded the most. Then I saw the grandfathers. Ships. Flags. Generations of men who seized land, raw materials, labour and bodies through violence and called it progress or civilization. I thought about everything they left behind. The memories that were never preserved. The voices that disappeared into silence.

I realized that what in me had never found a place in his world might not simply be my own. It might be a bodily echo carried across generations.

All those ways of knowing that cannot easily be captured or measured. The signals of our bodies. The rhythms of the soil. The movements of the weather. These had all been pushed aside. Presence, attentiveness, care and wonder had become unimportant because his world could not calculate them.

That knowledge still lives in my hands. In my nose recognizing something before my mind does. In the feeling in my gut that tells me when something is wrong. In what cannot always be explained, but is still carried within me.

Had I lived in his world for too long?

His logic still lives inside me. My days fill themselves with lists and tasks to complete. I compare, count, hurry and control. I am free to live differently, yet I still measure my value by what I produce.

More bodies than mine are protesting. People are breaking everywhere, land is being depleted and water is being polluted, but the language we use remains abstract, continuing to revolve around economic systems, numbers, conflicts and ownership of land and resources. As if everything that matters but cannot easily be counted does not fully exist.

Capitalism gave his way of thinking a form, a language and justification. But I don’t think that is where it all begins.

Capitalism did not create humanity’s desire for power and control. It simply built a system that rewards and organizes it and calls it success.

What perhaps hurts the most is not only everything he took from me, but how often I helped him do it. How I accepted a slow drift instead of raising my voice, hoping that politics, legislation, institutions or someone braver than me would regulate it on my behalf.

But they too have been shaped by the same logic. They are made up of people, yet they are also structures that shape what people are rewarded for, what they are allowed to do and what they can get away with.

We can imagine another world but if we do not practice acting as if that world is possible, it will never become real. It is in the moments - before we stay silent, choose comfort over unease or cross a line - like taking something that was never ours to take - that a different world begins to take shape.

I no longer believe that a new economic system, ideology or a hero will come along and save us all. We need systemic change, but none of that will be enough if we continue to carry the same understanding of value and power.

I want to learn how to rest without first having to prove my value through work. Stay in conversations that lead nowhere measurable. I don´t want to settle for exchanging glances with others when someone walks up to the table and takes all the salmon. I want to listen to the voice that tells me when a boundary has been crossed. It sounds almost ridiculously small. But what if that is exactly where everything begins? In those quiet moments when something deep inside us tells us that something is wrong.

I want this, but not only for myself. For her - the one who has carried this the longest.

The one who is still trying to carry us all.

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It’s strange what happens once you’ve become aware of something new. How a thought, an experience or a question that had only existed as a vague feeling suddenly takes shape. It stands there in full view, impossible to ignore. You start seeing it everywhere. In books you’ve already read. In films, conversations, people. In stories that may have been there all along but that you somehow didn’t yet have the inner language to truly hear.

Ever since I began exploring and writing about the space you enter when you’ve left something behind but haven’t yet fully stepped into whatever comes next, I’ve been seeing it everywhere.

My mind seems to organize reality differently now, and I’m beginning to wonder whether it’s not only the way I live that’s changing. Maybe it’s also the way I understand myself. Or rather, the story I use to make sense of my life.

My routines no longer hold my days together the way they used to. Ambitions that once drove me have lost their direction. Places that used to define me no longer feel like home, while others are beginning to pull me in without me really knowing why.

My rhythms are changing too. A new one has quietly emerged. I wake at dawn with thoughts that want to be written. My body wants to stay in bed. The rest of the family is asleep. I should probably be asleep too. But I listen instead. I read, then pour out words, back and forth between the two. Sometimes I fall asleep again.

It’s as if my entire inner operating system is being dismantled. Every supporting wall. Every piece of furniture. None of the words I’ve learned to describe myself with, the ones tied to my profession or identity, can really explain what’s happening. This goes much deeper than that.

On the days I feel strong, the movement feels completely natural. But on the days I doubt myself, I borrow the old worldview again. I see myself through the eyes of people who’ve known me for years, wondering what happened, where I disappeared to, and what strange, fluffy things I’m doing now.

For a moment, I see myself through their story. And in that story, I look a bit crazy.

That’s why texts that remind me there are other ways of understanding what it means to be human have become so important. That what I’m experiencing isn’t necessarily a sign that I’ve lost my way, but perhaps that the old map no longer describes the landscape I’m living in.

There’s comfort in reading and realizing I’m not nearly as unusual as I sometimes feel. That others, in other times, have tried to describe the same strange experience. That there are stories of dissolution that aren’t about collapse but about reorganization. That there are languages that describe the in-between as a necessary part of becoming.

It gives me the courage to stay in that space a little longer. To keep searching until what now feels unfamiliar becomes self-evident.

The Story

What stories do we actually tell about what it means to be human?

From an early age we’re taught that a life should be told in a certain way. That it should have direction. An identity. A main character who slowly becomes more fully themselves.

We’re supposed to choose a path. Find ourselves. Make something of ourselves. Become someone. And then we’re expected to hold on to that story. To be consistent. Coherent. Understandable, both to ourselves and to others.

We introduce ourselves with nouns. I’m an entrepreneur. I’m a doctor. I’m a carpenter. I’m a parent. As though those words explain who we are.

Sometimes we replace one noun with another, as if the answer were simply to find a label that fits better. But the story itself doesn’t change. It still assumes that life moves forward in a clear direction, that each step can be explained by the one before it, and that the main character remains stable throughout.

Maybe that’s why change feels so much like death. The story stops working. We no longer know how to describe ourselves. How to make sense of ourselves, to others or even to ourselves.

Someone asks what I do. I begin to answer and realize the sentence never quite ends. None of the words fit anymore. What I’m describing is an older version of someone who no longer exists.

And it’s not only that I haven’t found the right story. It’s the shape of the story itself. It assumes a fixed centre. A self that owns its history, chooses its direction, and remains recognisable over time. But that’s a fairly modern idea of what a human being is. And probably not the whole truth.

It gives the in-between a different meaning. It’s not an empty space left behind by a lost self. It may be the place where something other than the self is able to emerge.

We have almost no language for that experience. We have words for success and failure, career changes and life crises. But very few words for the place where the old order no longer works and the new one cannot yet be told.

Which is why the in-between so easily becomes a problem to solve. We try to fill it. Explain it. Optimise it as much as our relationships, our time, or our finances allow. We try to get through it as quickly as possible.

Rarely do we ask whether the in-between is a place in its own right. An essential part of how a life changes, with its own rhythm, its own language, and a kind of knowledge that cannot always be understood.

Circe

Trying to listen more closely to my inner compass, my intuition and instincts, rather than the rational structure of what I think I should do, has also meant giving up the idea that books need to be read in order or for any particular purpose. Instead, I find myself opening the ones that, for reasons I can’t explain, keep asking for my attention. Madeline Miller’s Circe was one of them.

A friend of mine was so inspired by Circe that she wrote an album. I heard her, but I didn’t really listen at first. Then I found the book in my father’s bookshelf after he died, unread and slightly faded by the sun, as if it had been waiting for me.

I thought I was about to read a novel about a Greek goddess. Instead, it quietly crept under my skin from the very first sentence, and I began to glimpse entirely new ways of understanding what it means to be human.

Now I wonder if I’ve been reading Greek mythology the wrong way all along. Thinking of the gods as characters, when perhaps they can be read as a forgotten language for the inner life. Something deeply alive rather than something to study. Forces moving through us.

Love. Struggle. Wisdom. Desire. Play. Memory. Intoxication.

Seen that way, the change I’m going through becomes something else entirely. I no longer have to think that I’m becoming someone different. I only need to make room for something that has spent far too long in the background.

We already do this all the time. We are one person with our parents, another with our friends, and someone else again when we’re alone. Different parts of us come forward in different situations, yet we keep talking about ourselves as though there were one stable self beneath it all, simply waiting to be discovered.

Somewhere deep down I suspect that this stable self is a very modern idea. Perhaps human beings have always been more like weather. Warmth and cold. Winds moving through us, gathering strength or fading away as something else quietly takes their place.

I don’t know if that’s true. Perhaps it’s only one way of reading it. But right now, I’m much less interested in understanding the book, or even what its author intended, than I am in understanding myself.

Circe gives me a map. A way of seeing that this in-between is neither a failure nor the end of the story. A map that allows me, at least for a while, to stop looking for the person I ought to be and instead become curious about the one who is still coming into being.

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I've explored this more elsewhere: the idea that we were never meant to be complete on our own, and that intelligence may be something that emerges between us rather than something we each possess individually.

This is becoming a book - and I need you to make it real. If any of this resonates, please consider pre-ordering. Your support doesn’t just fund a book - it signals that these perspectives matters.

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I lost my words when my father’s heart stopped beating. He was sitting in his favorite armchair, the way he always did after lunch, and in the middle of a sentence, in a novel about the Second World War, he was suddenly gone. Quietly, with the book still in his hand. Almost poetic for a man who was terrified of losing himself to old age. It happened exactly as quickly as I think he would have wanted - but far too quickly for those of us left behind.

I fell silent. For a long time, I thought the next thing I wrote would have to be about him. It needed to be. I thought I needed to stand on the rooftops and scream that he was gone and that life would never be the same again. That I could never be the same again. That the world couldn’t either.

But it’s impossible. He can’t be captured. Nothing I could say would do him justice. The moment I try, he becomes too small. Too defined. As if he and his life could be reduced to a few traits and anecdotes. He was bigger than all of that, and he exists in other ways - in the spring wind and in the books he left behind. In my hands that still remember the feeling of being washed by his before dinner when they were small. He exists in sunlit fish scales, in jazz, in scents. In the absence of the sounds he made, the ones that still belong to the house I grew up in - humming, groaning, quietly singing to himself.

But maybe most of all, he exists inside me.

The layers of grief

I’ve felt grief before, but never like this. It’s so fundamental and all-consuming, as if half of me has been amputated and I can still feel the phantom pain. As if the limbs remain as memories in my nervous system and I’m still trying to move them.

Grief is difficult. Difficult to live inside, difficult to observe. Learning that grief does not work chronologically but in layers. Moving back and forth between unbearable pain, memories, everyday obligations, and sudden laughter that feels wrong and yet somehow relieving at the same time. One step forward, two steps back. A strange dance that you can only follow, impossible to control.

The crooked rib

I lose myself in photographs. Childhood, youth, everyday life, travels. I get reacquainted with my grandmother and my relatives. Proud and upright, made from tough Estonian-Swedish stock, carrying flight and scarcity with them. Happy, hardworking, together, but also marked by loss and grief. People who learned not to speak about what was difficult. Who carried their history in their bodies instead of in words.

My son has a crooked rib that sticks out slightly. Just like me. Just like my father. I remember feeling happy the first time I noticed it, and when I think about it now, I cry. Not out of grief but because of something else I don’t quite have words for. The way certain things travel through generations without asking permission. A facial expression. A temperament. A way of entering a room. Or a crooked rib.

I inherited his curiosity about the world. His need to understand. His stubbornness. His ability to walk straight ahead without blinking. My son inherited his body, his posture, his interests.

My father walked his own path, never avoided discomfort, expressed - not infrequently to the horror of the family - everything he thought, without softening it. He loved the written word, the worlds it could create. I grew up surrounded by newspapers and headlines, with the world sitting at the dinner table. Palme was someone you greeted. Fälldin was someone you traveled to China with, and Mona Sahlin was someone you lent a lighter to. The world, politics, and history were like air - you breathed them in without thinking about it.

We did not always get along. He demanded a kind of perfection I didn’t want to deliver, and he rarely gave praise - but when he did, you felt like the best person in the world. He did not always understand that other people could function differently from him. Dinners could spiral because we could not meet each other.

Over the years, we slowly learned how to navigate those minefields with a kind of care. We separated ourselves from our opinions and tried to meet each other anyway. Among the hundreds of books he left behind, I find several written by and about young women, as if he was trying to understand me, just as I turned to old photographs to understand him.

To be seen

His gaze is still my compass. Who am I when he no longer exists?

The only thing I have wanted for as long as I can remember was to be acknowledged for who I am and not for who he wanted me to be. There is probably more than one psychologist who would have something to say about being over fifty and still wanting permission from my father. But I am slowly realizing that it is bigger than that. That I have held myself back, polished myself down, and performed not only for his sake but because the world demanded it. That he was the clearest representative of a world I want to leave behind but one he desperately tried to keep me inside. He could sense what was coming. Where I was heading. He saw me, but he did not always have the words to meet me there.

He could never affirm who I was, only what he himself was. He was the rational one, I was the intuitive one, and even though we provoked each other, we eventually learned that we could love each other without agreeing. In the final years, we could even joke about it.

I remember the moment I realized that fathers could be sad. It was a terrible realization. It completely unsettled me and, with the naivety of a child, I thought about it for days. My father rarely showed sadness. Or honestly, never. Tough guys don’t dance. Or cry, and so on. A masculine ideal from another century, but with other sides too - he always showed up. Explained things. Took time. Massaged my lower back when I was a teenager with period pain. Helped me move. Supported me. Helped me. Stayed close.

When I stop

I was already on my way somewhere when he disappeared. Away from something, toward something else. Grief did not stop that movement, it deepened it. In the stillness that follows a loss, a lot falls away on its own. Posturing. Urgency. Irrelevancies. Things I was reading and people I believed in three months ago now provoke some kind of disgust. I have no interest whatsoever in pretending.

I recently read a quote: that becoming middle-aged is like being sixteen again, but liking yourself this time. I thought about who I was at sixteen - what I wanted, what I felt strongly about, what I had not yet learned to tone down - and I feel so strongly that I want to rediscover the person I came here as, not the person I learned to become.

Maybe that is what he gave me in the end, without even knowing it. Not only an inheritance backward, but permission forward. To stop. To begin again from the right place. With conviction this time, and with words to explain it. But I do not look the same, do not feel the same, and need to rethink how I move through the world.

…
Well, I finally got something out, Dad. It feels different knowing you are not sitting there printing everything out anymore (yes, I found the secret drawer with everything you saved). But I am afraid to send this out now because it feels as though I have made you into something graspable and moved on, even though I do not want to. I mostly just want to stay here among all your things and feel your presence.

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I have never understood money. Not the way others seem to. It stresses me, sometimes even frightens me, and it enters conversations that are really about something else and makes everything else smaller. In the worlds I try to move in - the regenerative, the circular - I see how money both enables and at the same time locks us into old patterns.

I understand why society is built around money and the efficiency created by following a certain frequency. Salaries arrive at the end of the month. Taxes are paid once a year. The regular rhythm. But I have often moved at a different pace. Where money demands continuity, sharpness, foresight and accumulation, I have lived more in intensity and in-between spaces. When I am ready to talk about value, others have already moved on. Promises are broken. Debt appears. And we lack language for what happens in between - the human dimension of the transaction. Money is instrumental. What happens in the exchange is what is truly important and interesting.

Early in life I thought I needed two tracks. One where I earned enough, and another where I did what felt meaningful. They never met. What mattered rarely carried money. And what carried money rarely carried me. But if we are to find a more life-giving relationship to money, we need to start speaking about it differently.

Harsh experiences

I am tired of harsh experiences. Of giving time, knowledge, relationships and money to projects that others then move on from without looking back. Of ending up in contexts where I give without receiving anything in return, or where I am expected to give something other than what I actually feel able and willing to give.

I am tired of blaming myself. Of conversations that never quite conclude. Of the idea that if I just give the right things, the universe will return them multiplied.

I have been in too many rooms where shared enthusiasm slowly lost its color. We began with energy, ideas and trust - and ended in silence. Almost always at the very moment money entered the room.

Someone says, “We split it equally.” It looks simple and fair. Percentages on paper. But the same contribution does not cost everyone the same. Fifty hours can be a hobby for someone with a financial buffer and a risk for someone who does not know how to pay next month’s rent. The same yes can be light for one person and existential for another. This is where I have cracked a little. In those imbalances no one really talks about. When I have given time, knowledge, carried relationships and held contexts together without even being aware that I was doing it. When I have thought it will sort itself out, as if generosity were its own guarantee, blind to what was actually happening, and then woken up at night counting. Not just money but energy, who came up with what, who connected whom to whom.

The body knows that accounting. It tells the story. Now it is mostly tired. And alert. What I lack is money, yes. But also ways to say: this costs me more than it appears.

We enter with different portfolios

For those of us who do not make money from money, money is frozen time. An amount for an hour. But time is not neutral. My hour and your hour are not always the same. In someone’s hour there may be anxiety, debt, children waiting, uncertainty. In yours there may be security, a network, privilege, alternatives. We enter every collaboration with different kinds of portfolios.

One person enters with:

• Money and financial buffer

• Time without existential pressure

• Contacts in a specific industry

• Security to take risks

Another enters with:

• Knowledge in a specific field

• Experience from similar projects

• The ability to structure chaos

• No financial margin and small children at home or ill relatives

A third with:

• Premises and materials

• Local anchoring and trust

• A large and broad network

• Limited time

A fourth with:

• The courage to take risks when others hesitate

• The ability to see patterns where others see confusion and to articulate what is needed to move forward

• The capacity to hold space for other people’s processes

• No network to fall back on

We pretend all of this can be reduced to the same currency. That it can be compared. That “50/50” is fair simply because the numbers say so. But how do we value a network? Courage? Years of accumulated knowledge? And above all: does an hour cost the same for everyone? A larger portfolio is not just a list of assets but a map of what is actually at stake.

The overlooked currency

This is where exploitation slips in, the kind we - in the West at least - do not always want to see, but instead beautify and turn into admirable character traits. I believe many of us carry it without thinking about it, as a kind of blindness. That is why someone can hold left-leaning values and still feel compelled to play the game because everyone else does, while secretly dreaming of everything money could give them.

Two people can contribute the same thing - the same number of hours, the same task, the same delivery - but at entirely different cost. For one, it is safe. For the other, it is existential. One person can work unpaid for a while without major consequences. They have a buffer. They have a network to fall back on. They have time and space to experiment. Another risks their rent, their health, their sense of belonging by doing the same thing.

When we do not talk about risk, we create the illusion of fairness. When we acknowledge risk, something else emerges: relational fairness. This is where many collaborations fall apart - because we lack language to talk about what something actually costs us. And to examine which values we truly carry into collaborations, even if we claim something else.

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Surplus and deficit

When we do not talk about deficit, we begin to feel ashamed of it. We pretend to be self-sufficient islands, while in reality we depend on each other’s surplus. I have started to see it as an exercise in honesty. What do I have in abundance that does not drain me to give? What do I lack that money cannot quite buy? When I answer for myself, I see that I have much others may not know about. And I lack things I have barely articulated to myself. All of this shifts over time and may need to be reformulated depending on circumstances, but what would happen if it were actually verbalized, early, in every new context we enter? What do you need, and what are you willing to give?

In the new contexts we want to build, the alternatives to the economic systems we are used to, money still finds its way in and becomes as much an obstacle as it can be an opportunity. I see it again and again. Projects that began with values of reciprocity still end with someone holding more power because they had capital from the start. That is how it works, especially because we lack language for all the other values circulating.

I am not saying money should not be a factor. Of course it is still necessary. But it can no longer be the only factor. In the current logic nothing else is worth anything unless it can be priced, and in regenerative circles money is often treated as something almost shameful, something one prefers not to talk about. What we need is to make all factors visible - time, materials, knowledge, networks and money - and value them in new ways, with a new logic. If money is the only thing we navigate by, it becomes inevitable that you work to generate, extract and accumulate. It shapes how generous you are, what you allow to emerge, how loudly you speak and who gets a seat at your table. When you let other values in, you begin to cultivate different kinds of cultures.

When we start speaking like this, something changes in the room. “50/50” suddenly becomes a question, not a principle. We can say: you are risking your livelihood here. I am risking almost nothing. It is not the same contribution, even if the hours look identical. It is much harder to drain someone you actually see. Exploitation becomes visible, and therefore harder. Imbalance can be flagged early, before the relationship breaks. Consideration is trained through visibility - when you know someone is risking their livelihood by contributing time, you begin to think differently.

Invisible work gains contours: the one who holds the group together, the one who makes sure people are okay, the one who carries local knowledge and relationships. Language redistributes power. When we count in more currencies, more people gain access to power. And what is visible becomes harder to exploit.

A practice, not a solution

Portfolio thinking is not a method you can get “right.” It is a practice in being different together. It requires the courage to say what you actually have - and what you actually lack. To say: this does not feel balanced. To say: I need something else now.

We will make mistakes. We will slip back. Someone will still feel used. Portfolios change. Someone’s security can collapse overnight. Someone else’s time can suddenly open up. What was existential in March may be manageable in September. But when we try to make the portfolios visible - when we train ourselves to talk about risk, balance and what is actually circulating - we move in the right direction.

It will feel strange. Imprecise. Uncertain. We will long for something clearer, something measurable. But that is precisely the longing we need to resist. It is there, in the pursuit of the exact, that we often freeze what is alive.

What is needed is not a fixed distribution. What is needed is an ongoing conversation: renegotiation, attentiveness, the courage to signal when something has changed.

Starting where you stand

Sometimes I think it may not be a new economy we need first. It may be exactly this. Being honest and saying: I want to contribute, but I do not want to disappear. I want to give, but not drain myself, and I want there to be movement back over time, in some form. To see injustice and notice when imbalance arises. Simply because nothing living survives that.

I can only dream of the day when those with a great deal of money do the same and genuinely want to share their surplus without demanding even more money in return, perhaps choosing to recognize other forms of value. Or simply asking for a little less in return.

You do not have to wait for systemic change. You can begin in the next conversation. Say: this is where I have abundance. This costs me more than it seems. This is what I need in order to stay.

This kind of portfolio thinking is not a solution. It is a language for keeping the conversation alive. A practice in seeing each other better. When we begin to count in more currencies than money, it does not only change distribution, it changes who gets to participate and who is able to remain.

The portfolio perspective is inspired by the method “Slicing Pie.”

This is becoming a book - and I need you to make it real. If this resonates, please consider pre-ordering. Your support doesn’t just fund a book - it signals that this perspective matters.

And for practicing all of this together with me - join the 100 days process.

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I keep circling the space between knowing and doing.

We know a great deal. We have the facts. We feel it in our bodies. We argue for it, worry about it, plan for it, prepare for it. And yet, at this moment in history, understanding is no longer enough. The world is changing regardless.

So I keep asking myself, again and again: Am I doing enough – in my own life?

Which actions actually create movement? What travels through social layers, becomes visible to others, subtly shifts something? Like the butterfly’s wing becoming a hurricane. Small displacements that, under the right conditions, change everything.

I don’t believe this happens through more negotiations behind closed doors. Not through more strategies, agreements, or plans. I believe it happens through movement. Through how we live. How we speak. How we move through the world.

There is an undergrowth where real change takes place. Not in the visible parts of the big systems, but in how we actually live our days.

Rhythm is everywhere. In how fast things are supposed to get done. In what the body longs for. In how we move as one large body through subways, roads, and daily life, unconsciously adjusting to each other’s pace.

My protest against this time begins in my own life. I let the struggle take place inside me. And I move, slowly, in new directions.

This is what has become the compass I write about. And this is why I created 100 days.
The result of several years of writing, experimenting, and trying to live change in the middle of life, rather than just talking about it.

What is it?

100 days is a gentle way of stepping into a practice of living change while life is unfolding. It’s what I myself am trying to do as I write. A way of seeing reality differently together with others, and of beginning to move what we talk about – climate, economy, meaning, work, relationships – into the body, everyday life, and rhythm.

Over 12 weeks, we move through a compass. Each week carries a theme, a perspective, a way of seeing. A way of beginning to live differently now.

It is subtle. It is slow. And it is enough – especially if many of us do it together.

Others have already begun, and you can step in at any point, when it fits your life. Here is the first week. If you want to continue through the other points of the compass, you’ll find more information at the end.

Week 1 – Rhythm

The first week is about your rhythm. How you move through your days. How you rest, hurry, pause, listen.

Rhythm is not speed. Speed is how fast something needs to be done. Rhythm is attunement – with the body, with the season, with the people and contexts you actually live within.

We have learned to follow tempo, and forgotten how to listen for rhythm.

Maybe you follow your calendar closely. Maybe you sense your body more clearly at times. Maybe you’ve noticed how energy shifts with light, seasons, or the people you’re with.

That’s where rhythm already exists – beneath the surface of everything that “has” to get done.

Start where you are

The first movement is to see life as it actually is right now. The more clearly you see where you stand, the easier it becomes to sense where change might begin.

Even that requires a shift in rhythm. Stopping long enough to see what comes to you, instead of chasing something.

Questions to carry with you this week

• When do you feel in sync with yourself?

• When do you keep going even though something in you wants to stop?

• Are there already places, relationships, or habits where a different rhythm is alive?

• What do you long to give more space to?

• What do you know – deep down – that you need to let go of?

This week’s practice: see your system

Rhythm becomes visible when you see the whole. You can’t sense whether you’re in or out of tune until you see what you’re actually moving within. That’s why we begin here.

Take a piece of paper, post-its, colors, or a digital tool. How it looks doesn’t matter. What it evokes does.

• Write “me” in the center.

• Let circles or threads grow outward – like roots or a network.

Explore in layers, going as deep as you can and want:

Relationships
Who gives energy? Who takes? What wants to deepen or change?

Structures & contexts
Where do you adapt? Where do you feel free?

Energy & habits
What nourishes you? What drains you? Which patterns repeat?

Thoughts & longing
What occupies your inner life right now? What wants to be created?

World & current times
What in the world touches you most strongly – through worry, frustration, or hope?

If it feels right, add a layer for rhythm:
When are you most awake? When does tiredness arrive? When does presence arise – or restlessness?

Do this in the way that suits you best. Make space. Sit somewhere alone and undisturbed. Sit for a long time or in shorter moments. Let the questions live with you throughout the week.

There are no demands here. Nothing needs to be finished. Something simply needs to begin to live.

The questions are meant to take up space in you, and the different points of the compass will take shape in different ways, with different intensity, when the time is right in your life.

A final question you might ask yourself at the end of the week: What do you see now that you didn’t see as clearly before?

Want to deepen your view on rhythm?

If you want to read more about how I’ve struggled with rhythm myself – and how our time has lost its living rhythms – you can read the essay Rhythm here:
https://thestartingpoints.substack.com/p/why-rhythm-is-a-systemic-question

And if you’re curious about the gap between knowing and doing, I recently wrote about akrasia – the human tendency to act against our better judgement:
https://thestartingpoints.substack.com/p/the-gap-between-insight-and-action

The texts I write, everything I wrestle with and try to understand, are inhalations.
100 days is my way of exhaling – on my own, and together with others.

Want to continue?

I want us to become many more who move at a different pace. Who place ourselves elsewhere. Who find new words. Who refuse some things – and open for others.

If you feel that you need this and want to continue through the coming 11 weeks, you are warmly welcome. The program has a price, but you pay what you can. And if money isn’t right for you at all right now, write to me – we can exchange value in other ways.

Read more and sign up here.

Please invite people around you and do it together. Bring it into your workplace. Use meeting time to begin seeing what’s happening in new ways, together.

Sometimes I close my eyes and see us beginning to find each other, moving slowly in other and new directions. Like a quiet protest – while looking the system straight in the eye.

This is everything I have. The only thing that feels true. The best I can give.

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There are different kinds of knowledge. There is the kind that can be understood, observed, sorted, and easily communicated. The kind we grasp rationally – perhaps not always something we care about or agree with – but it exists there, between us. It works through us.

And then there is this other kind of knowledge. The kind that is intimately tied to who you are and what you have lived. The knowledge we simply carry, what we know but cannot always explain.

I imagine intuition itself as a neutral field that is simply there, strong for some and weaker for others. With a voice that tells you something about everything you experience, a voice you can choose to listen to or ignore. It observes and tries to pass information to your conscious mind, usually quietly and muttering, but sometimes very loudly. And once you let it in, it is persistent.

It can want to hold you back – make you cautious, pull you inward – and it can want to push you forward, toward possibility. It can connect you to a wide range of emotions.

The problem arises when we believe we have to choose. As if there were a scale with intuition on one side and reason on the other, and one of them must weigh more. And almost always we choose the rational – not because it is more true, but because it is more defensible.

We have learned not to trust intuition until we can explain it. To doubt it until it is confirmed by numbers, studies, or consensus. We have learned that intuition is something that must be examined, taken apart, and understood before it is allowed to be true. But this very demand – to understand before we listen – is an expression of the worldview that is currently collapsing around us.

Here I want to explore why we need to shift the center of gravity and first listen to what is inherited, human, and bodily – and then act, and only after that, hopefully, understand.

Why we stopped listening

It was not always like this. In the world where humans were formed, intuition was not something mystical. It was survival. The ability to sense when something was wrong. To know, without words, that a situation was dangerous, that a person was not trustworthy, that the weather was about to change. Being able to read early signals – in the body, in the group, in the landscape – was what kept us alive.

But as the world became modern, the conditions changed. Knowledge became something that had to be proven, not just felt. Rational thinking became the standard, the measure of what was real. And everything that could not be accounted for in words, numbers, or logical steps was viewed with suspicion.

In almost every context, intuition ended up on the wrong side of this new boundary. It was labeled “gut feeling,” “hunch,” “female intuition” – always with an implicit distrust. Something that might turn out to be right sometimes, in hindsight, but that could not really be relied on.

And so we trained it away. Not completely, but enough for it to lose its legitimacy. Enough for us to stop listening when the body contradicted the mind. Enough for us to teach our children to “think it through” instead of “feel it through.”

The rational did not become a complement to the intuitive. It became a replacement.

But the body has already understood

But we need to rethink this. Not see intuition as something other than knowledge, but as knowledge in an early form. Tor Nørretranders has described how human beings take in millions of bits of information in any given moment, while only a fraction of it can be held in consciousness. When I am talking to you, at best I can remember what I intend to say, keep a thread, and stay attentive to your reaction, to how what I am saying is received. Maybe I am a bit self-conscious, or notice an itch somewhere, but that is roughly what I register. The body, on the other hand, picks up subtle reactions, temperatures, what happens in the periphery, how people move around us, and much, much more. All of this is processed continuously in the body, in the nervous system, in the unconscious. What we call intuition or gut feeling is often precisely this: knowledge the body holds that has not passed through consciousness, but exists nonetheless, even though it has not yet found language.

Daniel Kahneman called this System 1 – the fast, automatic, pattern-recognizing mode of thinking that operates alongside the slow, analytical System 2. Not as a lesser form of intelligence, but as a different one.

Malcolm Gladwell showed in the book Blink how experts often make accurate decisions in seconds, without being able to explain how. They just know – far below the surface of consciousness.

The paradox is that all of this is usually presented in rational terms – as proof that we should understand intuition. As arguments that it is, in fact, rational, just in a different way. As a way of legitimizing it by showing that it can be translated into the language the system recognizes.

But what if it is precisely this – our constant attempt to “explain” intuition – that makes us unable to hear it?

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The cost of waiting

We have all experienced it. The times when we sensed something but did not listen. The relationship we entered even though something resisted. The decision that felt wrong, but where theory and numbers pointed in the right direction. The conversation where we felt something was missing, but said nothing because it could not be proven.

In hindsight, it becomes obvious. “I knew it,” we say. “I felt it all along.” But why did we not listen then? Because we could not explain it. Because it seemed like no one else saw it. Because the system – the organization, the norm, the logic – said something else.

And so, slowly, we drifted into a state where we are now paying the price. Not only personally, but collectively. Polycrisis, the collapse of multiple systems. Again and again, history shows the same pattern: someone sensed it. Someone saw it. Someone warned of it. But they lacked the kind of proof the system recognized, and so they were ignored. Until it was too late.

Collectively, where we are right now, we have of course long since moved beyond intuition on one level – through research and constant evidence, we know where we stand. But individually, we remain stuck. Most of us are still caught in the web of systems, acting according to what is required of us rather than expressing what we feel where it would actually matter.

The change that is needed cannot be articulated in a new plan or strategy. We do not need more reports. What we need is to begin expressing what feels wrong – and to find ways for what we intuitively sense to meet the intuition of others. Only then can we, collectively, begin to move in new ways.

So the problem is not a lack of intuition. It is the lack of willingness to listen to it before it can be proven.

The collective body

What we call intuition carries layers. Biological. Cultural. Collective. Some of what we feel is older than ourselves. A kind of inherited wisdom, shaped by generations of survival. These are patterns etched into the human body over thousands of years of distinguishing threat from safety, friend from foe, what endures from what does not.

When many people sense the same thing at the same time – an unease, an attraction, a warning – it is not coincidence. It is the system’s sensors responding to something that has not yet appeared in the statistics.

But to sense this, we need to be connected. To ourselves. To one another. To something larger than us. This is precisely what modern rationality has severed. We have learned to trust systems over people. Data over lived experience. Proof over what is felt.

Yet the systems themselves rest on assumptions that no longer hold. They emerged in a different world. Slower. Simpler. More stable. In a time of rapid change, complex interdependencies, and systemic threats, collective intuition is often more accurate than established frameworks. Because it reacts earlier. It reads patterns that are not yet measurable. It senses shifts that have not yet become visible.

Daring to listen before we understand

I am not suggesting that we abandon analysis. That we become uncritical or follow every impulse without reflection. What I want is to reverse the order – not least in my own life.

First listen, then act, then understand.

Trust the body when it pushes back. Stay with something that feels wrong even when it looks right, or when a concern refuses to loosen its grip. And pay attention when many of us are sensing the same thing at the same time – because there is often something real there.

When that happens, I take a deeper breath. I make space to articulate what I am carrying that has not yet found words. The attempts I have made so far suggest that our collective body knows far more than statistics or media reveal. Over the past year, I have been in meetings where I have experienced something I can only describe as magic. Where communication has been something other than verbal. Where together we have grasped something new – perhaps a state, perhaps a direction.

From there, it becomes easier to engage with rational considerations as well. The most radical act right now may be precisely this – to dare to trust what we already know. To let it out. To allow it to guide us into whatever comes next.

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For more writing from the edge where an old world fades and a flickering new one begins – visit WEAVE or subscribe. And for practicing all of this together with me - join the 100 days process.

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When I look back at the most important change projects I have led and taken part in, with the unsparing clarity that only time provides, and ask the question “What came of them?”, the answer is painfully clear. Very little. And why? Why so little, when the intentions were sound, the engagement broad, and the sense of urgency so strongly articulated? The answer is this: a lack of accountability. Everything comes down to that.

I have spent years trying to understand how change actually happens. I did everything right. Mapped, analysed, anchored, driven. I have seen where the knots in the systems are. Which decision points carry real transformative potential, and which structures exist mainly to cement inequality.

The initiatives were well received. “Great.” “Important.” “Finally.” Finished reports travelled upwards through decision hierarchies. I have sat in meetings at government level, been interviewed in the media, and received praise from leading researchers. The solutions were there. And still, very little happened.

There is a painful truth here: the system keeps circling the core issue. Actually taking responsibility.

New projects are launched after mine. I see them. The energy, the new faces, the courage. I see visions being articulated, teams forming, enthusiasm spreading. But somewhere along the way, these efforts too begin to hollow out. Resistance grows. Not only in individuals, but within the structure itself. Language is adjusted to avoid friction. What was once radical becomes manageable. The original vision fades, once again. What remains are a few empty words. At best, a reorganisation, with new titles but no real movement.

The system is not built to carry responsibility for change. It is designed to neutralise whatever threatens the purpose it was built to serve. It rejects what challenges its logic, absorbs what can be adapted, and then returns to its default state.

What I have experienced here is not an exception. It is the pattern itself.

The vacuum

We live in an accountability vacuum. The language is there, polished. The policy documents are immaculate. Everything appears to be done, but once decisions are made, responsibility is spread so thin that it effectively dissolves. And when it disappears from the system, it lands with the individual. This is not by design, and it is not a conspiracy. It is gravity.

When nothing else carries it, responsibility falls to the place where some form of presence still exists. Individuals are expected to carry the climate, public health, equality, democracy, the future itself, as if we were universal cogs in a machine we never helped to design.

As a result, we have moved from shared mandate to individual morality. This shift, from collective agency to private guilt, has crept in so slowly, so gently, that we barely noticed it.

But now we are beginning to feel the exhaustion.
The guilt.
The paralysis.

Responsibility itself – the inner compass

I am interested in where responsibility actually lives. Especially because the world is so full of performative responsibility, words heavy with the promise of action that never lead where they claim to go. Perhaps it is not responsibility itself that causes friction, but where we place it. The loneliness of it. The unreasonableness of being expected to carry heavy burdens without access to the tools, without rights to the system, without real influence.

Before we can understand why responsibility disappears, we first need to understand where it lives. Because responsibility is not a trait, not a point in time. It is a movement that passes through several layers, and it can fall away at any one of them.

Responsibility often begins with knowledge. With seeing. Understanding. Becoming aware of a context, a consequence, a pattern. Realising that something is wrong, or at least does not add up. Without that insight, there is no responsibility at all, only routine. And if you are given a mandate to change something without having the knowledge, responsibility already disappears at this stage.

Knowledge in itself does not create responsibility. It only creates the possibility for it. And without a mandate, it often brings something else with it: worry, grief, anger. An emotional load that rarely has anywhere to go. When knowledge is not met with emotional space, it becomes overwhelming. Responsibility can stall there too.

When knowledge is present, processing begins, and in the best case, deliberation. Is this my responsibility? What can I do about it? Can I make a difference? What will it cost me, and what happens if I do nothing? This is where an inner negotiation takes place, a moral orientation. What do I actually stand for?

This is also where many people get stuck, because the deliberation lacks direction. The words are there, the values are there, but nothing carries them forward. The reasoning circles without reaching action. Not out of cowardice, but because the conditions are missing.

At this level there is also a kind of false responsibility. Taking on a mandate, for example, or responsibility without having the knowledge. Saying you will do something without enough experience to understand that it will not work. Failing to look at previous attempts to do the same thing, overestimating your own capacity, feeling pressured by what is current or by what others seem to expect of you.

When a decision has been made that something should be done, and responsibility is taken, the next crucial layer appears: placement. How is this responsibility to be lived? Where? With what risks? Together with whom? Here it becomes clear that responsibility is not only an inner stance, but also a practical question of mandate and possibility.

People orient themselves differently here. Some take responsibility where they have direct control: in the near, the concrete, the visible. They protect, regulate, keep order. For them, responsibility must produce effects that can be seen and measured. Others take responsibility for larger contexts, collective, slow, future-oriented. They are guided more by compass than by results. Knowing that one is acting rightly has to be enough. So there are different ways of carrying responsibility.

After this, responsibility meets the collective space. Organisations. Norms. Other people. Here responsibility can take root, or dissolve. It may be met with response, shared, strengthened. It may be met with silence, resistance, or subtle punishment. Or the mandate to act on what has been seen may simply be missing altogether.

This is probably where responsibility most often disappears. Not because people stop caring, but because responsibility is not given a clear form to live in. When it is not met, not answered, not anchored, not shared, it becomes marginalised. Or it is pushed onto individuals and their capacity. And individual responsibility for collective issues quickly turns into exhaustion, frustration, shame, or cynicism.

Responsibility should not be a burden, a duty, or a yoke. Responsibility is a response. A listening. A I will take this on, for real. But it is also relational. It requires someone else to hear it. Someone else to respond. A structure that carries more than a single human spine.

Genuine responsibility can, of course, also mean honouring a decision even when it is uncomfortable. Continuing to speak when no one applauds. Having a backbone. But responsibility cannot survive in isolation for very long. Without form, without mandate, without collective resonance, it erodes.

Perhaps this is exactly where the misunderstanding lies: it is not that people lack a sense of responsibility, but that time and again we place responsibility where it cannot live.

When responsibility lacks form, it becomes self-erasure

In a system where responsibility has no clear place, it is ultimately the most conscientious who step forward. Those who speak up. Those who hold the line. Those who stay when it becomes uncomfortable. Those who take on what no one else wants to carry.

They become a kind of temporary bridge over a structural breakdown. And they often pay with their health, their relationships, their sense of security.

When responsibility requires personal sacrifice every single time, it is not sustainable responsibility. It is a system externalising its own lack of structure onto people’s consciences.

The truly systemic failure, then, is not that people do not care. It is that there are no shared spaces where responsibility can be distributed, carried, and anchored without costing the individual everything.

After a decision to change has been made within an organisation, whether willingly or imposed by politics, legislation, or public opinion, it must take a collective form. But there is a lack of articulated structures for what responsibility actually means. What one will likely have to compromise on when a decision is made. Clearly formulated or visualised upsides and downsides. Who exactly needs to carry the decision, and how that responsibility should be embodied. Simply put, how the decision and the responsibility together need to travel through the organisation.

The anatomy of responsibility – the layers

Responsibility is a weave of relationships between decision, consequence, time, and context.

Responsibility does not arise when we express an intention, or even when we make a decision. It arises when decision and consequence are held together. When the person who makes the decision is also the one who must live with its consequences.

And it is my absolute, unquestionable conviction that no real change happens anywhere unless these two meet in the same body. If the person making the decision does not also have the mandate to carry it out and is not willing to live with the consequences, responsibility will slowly leak away. Between chairs, in communication gaps, in the fear of disturbing good relationships, in conflicts between goals.

In today’s systems, this connection is often broken. Decisions are made high up, in meeting rooms where the consequences are never felt in the body. The effects land elsewhere: with other people, in other parts of society, in the future.

This is why responsibility can seem to be everywhere, in words, policies, value statements, and yet be absent in practice. Where power and consequence do not meet, no real responsibility can exist. Only responsibility-like language or hopeful intentions.

What I call an accountability vacuum is therefore not the absence of responsible people. It is a system that actively separates decisions from their real costs. And as long as that separation remains, responsibility will always continue to flow downward.

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Responsibility as a discipline of time

Responsibility is not only shifted through hierarchies. It is also shifted through time. Decisions are made now. Profits are realised now. Efficiency is maximised now. The consequences are postponed. To later. To someone else. To the future.

This is how the climate crisis becomes a matter of individual choices rather than energy systems. This is how economic insecurity becomes a question of personal planning rather than political decisions. This is how stress, anxiety, and burnout are treated as individual problems in a world whose pace is systemically unsustainable.

Responsibility has been reduced to the ability to cope with consequences one did not help create. To be flexible. Adaptable. Forward-looking. Strong.

But real responsibility is also a refusal to export costs into time. A refusal to let the future pay the price for what feels convenient now, or to call it rationality when it is, in fact, deferred debt.

When responsibility is no longer bound to time, to what our decisions do to the world beyond the next quarter, the system can continue to function while everything slowly falls apart.

Responsibility in relation – role, capacity, context

Responsibility is also distributed, situated, relational. It depends on who you are, where you stand, what you can do.

Here, several logics collide:

• Individual responsibility (consumption choices)

• Corporate responsibility (production, supply chains)

• State responsibility (regulation, infrastructure)

• Historical responsibility (colonialism, emissions)

It is easy to feel overwhelmed. As if everything is too much. But responsibility is not something you “have”. It is something you orient yourself within.

Three questions help:

Role
What function do I have in this particular context or system?

Impact
What can amplify my actions?

Feedback
What consequences do I see over time?

There is the big world and the small world. A microcosm. You cannot carry everything. But you can carry something. And knowing what that is, that too is responsibility.

In the old logic, responsibility is often reactive, individualised, tied to guilt or control, something that can be delimited.

In a systemic and regenerative logic, responsibility instead becomes relational, situated within a context, connected to impact rather than guilt, something you orient yourself in, not something you “have”.

Systemic logic that undermines responsibility

The economic model we live within today unfortunately does not encourage responsibility, especially not beyond oneself or the economic entity one belongs to. You are expected to take care of yourself first.

The company with walls. The goal is to make it as profitable as possible. Costs arise outside those walls and are ignored. This breeds greed, secrecy, careerism, blame-shifting.

Systemically, it can look like this:

The customer buys ONLY what is available
(the responsibility THAT it exists lies with someone else)

Amazon ONLY distributes
(products that must be sold to people who must buy)

Suppliers ONLY do what the customer demands.

So who is supposed to stop, and why?

No one takes responsibility. Because the system rewards the opposite: pride, greed, ruthlessness, exploitation, competition, negotiation for personal gain, artificial growth.

Not care, cooperation, fairness, organic growth, or taking responsibility for the bigger picture and one’s impact across the whole chain.

Responsibility is not something that can be added if one feels like it. It has to be built into the business model. Into the logic itself.

The paradox

It is not what we say we are going to do, but what we actually do. Taking responsibility in practice often means being uncomfortable. Pointing out when words are not matched by action. Listening without becoming defensive. Daring to stay curious, even when it threatens one’s own position. Speaking the truth, even when it rubs against the language of the system.

And precisely for that reason, systems often reject those who take real responsibility. At first, they are welcomed with enthusiasm. “Now things are finally going to happen!” But it does not last. Not because the individuals are unclear or the proposals unreasonable, the premises are agreed upon from the start. What causes friction is that these people hold others accountable for what they themselves have said they want to achieve.

And that is where it breaks.

Systems cannot carry individuals or projects that demand integrity. Instead, they demand adaptation. It becomes more important to “keep a good atmosphere” than to speak plainly. More important to keep a customer than to tell the truth. More important to avoid friction than to undergo real change.

We are heading straight toward collapse, and we see it. Everywhere. But we do not talk about how it feels. We talk about what we do.

This creates a dissonance. A growing gap between the reality we see and the world we act within. And there, in that gap, silence grows. Around conference tables. In organisations. In conversations with those we work with.

We are not only expected to solve systemic problems, we are expected to do it with a smile. And when we fail? Then it is us who have not tried hard enough.

Real change is felt. It has a cost. It rubs. If it does not hurt in your gut right now, if relationships are not being tested, doors not closing, discomfort not felt in the body, then you are probably not part of any larger transformation.

Change hurts. And if it does not, you are likely not doing enough where you are right now.

Moral courage

Finally. It is crucial to distinguish between two very different kinds of responsibility, even though they are often confused. The responsibility that the existing system places on the individual, in the absence of decisive action, is backward-looking. It arises where power is lacking, but where consequences still have to be managed. It is about compensating, adapting, carrying the costs of decisions one never had any real influence over. A form of responsibility that keeps systems afloat by consuming people’s conscience, energy, and willingness to care for one another.

But the responsibility required for something new to emerge is something else entirely. It is not assigned. It is chosen. No existing system demands it, and no new structure yet exists that can carry it. It is a responsibility that does not aim to preserve what is old, but to make room for what has not yet taken shape.

Taking responsibility in a paradigm shift is therefore not about carrying more, but about carrying differently. It means refusing to continue compensating for systems that refuse to take responsibility themselves, and instead directing one’s energy toward the places where new relationships, new mandates, and new collective forms can begin to grow.

Here, responsibility changes direction. From maintenance to transformation. From guilt to choice. From solitary burden to something that can be shared.

It begins when someone steps forward despite the discomfort. Someone who does not wait for permission. Who does not shy away from complexity. Who sees a context and says:

“I hear this. I see this. I take this seriously.” And means it.

So the question is not only what we want to change, but what we are willing to lose in order for something else to be given space to grow.

Who raises their voice? Who stays when it hurts? Who says no to what is comfortable in order to say yes to what is right?

We need collective spaces for responsibility. We can point to the systems. We can demand that power is always joined with responsibility, and that responsibility is no longer pushed onto those who lack any real power to change things at all.

We can stop acting as consumers of what is destructive and become co-creators of something else.

But it begins when someone says: “I take this on. For real.” And refuses to keep dancing around it.

This is becoming a book with release in 2026 - and I need your help to make it real. If this resonates, please consider pre-ordering The Starting Point. Your support doesn’t just fund a book - it signals that these perspective matters.

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How do you even write convincingly about things you cannot touch? The human experience in relation to what we are expected to be. Sitting on the bus, being at work, having conversations without constantly talking about the fact that we are slowly destroying ourselves and that we are all complicit?

I am interested in what happens in the spaces in between. In the smile on the bus or the stolen glances during a meeting. What is felt inside but cannot be shown on paper.

The work meeting has become a symbol of this contrast for me. A number of people in different states – fatigue, joy, anxiety about the world and with different qualities – reflective, fast, attentive – enter a room. At some point long ago, someone decided that meetings should last one hour. During that hour, an agenda must be covered. A predetermined sequence of control mechanisms. At the end there may be a point for other matters – the more expansive ones – which rarely has time to happen. The agenda represents a kind of safety, an echo from a time when business could still look like this. Everything looks right on paper. The budget adds up. The timeline is realistic. Everyone nods in agreement. But everyone feels that something is wrong.

What would you even say? “I feel that this is not going to work”? Based on what? On a vague sensation in the body? On the way the silence sounded when someone finished speaking? On how quickly everyone just wants to move on?

So no one says anything. Six months later, the project collapses. Exactly as the body knew it would.

It is not the first time. We know things we cannot prove. We sense when something is about to happen. We read rooms, moods, energies – but we have learned not to trust that, because it cannot be measured. There is no way to make it credible in a system built for proof.

So we remain silent. And pay the collective price.

What is even allowed to count as real?

We have never known more than we do now – and at the same time we understand less and less of what refuses to be explained. Our worldview is built on measurability: what can be weighed, repeated, proven. This has given us remarkable progress, but it has also left a void where everything else falls away. Experience. Intuition. Coincidences. Dreams. The feeling that something larger is touching us. We notice it – but we lack a shared language and a place where it can be expressed and taken seriously.

And yet certain experiences keep recurring throughout history. Strange synchronicities that happen with exactly the right person at exactly the right moment. The influence of the full moon. Bodies that react to hands that are not even touching them. Contact with some form of greater knowing. For those who experience this, it is real. For those who do not – it does not exist. What we do not experience ourselves, or cannot encounter and observe objectively, does not quite count and therefore is not allowed to be part of the larger conversations.

So we place these stories to the side – in literature, in the private sphere. Intuition, dreams, emotions, trust, the quality of love. The sense that a room is safe or not. That someone is speaking truthfully – or not. Everything we actually navigate by, every day, but which we have learned to disregard in contexts where it truly matters.

At best, it is allowed in as a detail in our lives: we go to yoga, carry a crystal in our bag, lay tarot cards, talk to a medium and briefly marvel that there is something more – before returning to our compartmentalized everyday lives. Few allow these experiences to shape their entire orientation in life. And even fewer dare to take them further, into a conversation that could influence our collective development.

Those who live with the immeasurable as a guiding principle often end up in a role. One puts on certain words, clothes, symbols, gestures – outward signs of which alternative world one belongs to. It attracts the curious, but it also creates distance. Those who share the experience draw closer. For others, it becomes a gap. A misunderstanding. A caricature.

But what if it is not us who have lost our way – but our instruments that are insufficient? What if it is not reality that is too diffuse – but our models that are too small?

Two ways of meeting the world

It is no coincidence that some people are drawn to what cannot be measured. Symbols, myths, spirituality, intuition – they use these as guidance rather than truth, as a language for what has not yet become fully intelligible. Others hold more tightly to what is clear, verifiable, what can be pointed to and said: this is where we stand. Not because they lack depth, but because their task has always been to hold the world together when it threatens to come apart.

In the meeting between these orientations, friction arises. To even allow the immeasurable into a room built for goals, agendas and efficiency requires something unusual: enough trust to allow what is unclear, without losing one’s footing.

Conscious thought is an extreme bottleneck. It handles only a vanishingly small part of the information flowing through the body. The rest is processed outside language – in the nervous system, in the unconscious, in what cannot yet be said but already knows.

Intuition is not the opposite of rationality, but its precursor. It is not free imagination, but a form of rapid, unconscious pattern recognition built on experience, relationships and contexts that cannot yet be articulated. Intuition knows, but does not know that it knows. It speaks through sensations, pull, resistance, clarity or unease – signals that do not carry arguments, but direction.

And intuition is not only mental – it is deeply bodily. We experience the world directly through the body, before language has had time to formulate what is happening. The body knows where the chair is without measuring the distance. Feels someone’s gaze on the back of the neck before we turn around. Breath changes when we step into certain rooms.

But that kind of knowledge was never given space in the modern world. Because it cannot be reproduced in a lab. It cannot be standardized. It is relational – arising in the meeting between me and the world, not in isolated parts. The body became something we HAVE, not something we ARE. An instrument to optimize rather than a way of knowing.

The problem today is not excessive trust in intuition, but that we have learned to dismiss it as legitimate knowledge. We have built societies, organizations and decision-making processes that almost exclusively recognize what has already become language, model and number. In doing so, we lose access to information that has not yet become intelligible, but which is often decisive precisely in times of rapid change.

To take intuition seriously therefore does not mean abandoning reason, but restoring an order in which bodily, unconscious knowledge is allowed to be present early in the process – before it is tested, translated and stabilized into form. Only when we acknowledge that much of what we need to know reaches us before we can explain it can we begin to build systems where different ways of knowing actually work together.

Not as competing worldviews, but as different phases of the same human intelligence.

And so the body fell silent. Or rather: we stopped listening.

Politics as a mirror of personal experience

As individuals, we seem to struggle with relating to things we have not experienced ourselves. We readily assume that our own experience is universal – and this applies to our leaders as well. Politics is rarely only a matter of facts or analysis. It is a matter of what feels reasonable. And what feels reasonable does so because it aligns, in some way, with our inner map – our history, our cognitive patterns, our upbringing, our traumas, our privileges.

Many political proposals are, at their core, stories: “When I did it this way, it worked – therefore everyone should do it this way.” But this also means that politics often starts from ONE path. ONE perspective. ONE solution to complex problems that in reality hold a hundred different needs. There is an implicit ideal at work: that the human being is – or should be – rational, independent, verbal, resilient, goal-oriented – and politics shapes structures accordingly.

But what happens to all those who do not fit that ideal? Those who need more time in school. Those who learn best through bodily movement or intuition. Those who are not cognitively equipped to navigate bureaucratic rules, but have strong social sensitivity. There are few political visions that acknowledge that people differ at a fundamental level – that we do not only have different needs, but different ways of perceiving reality. Instead, society is shaped around an average – a mean value – where certain experiences become the template, and others become deviation.

This is not always a matter of unwillingness – often it is simply a lack of imagination. We can only imagine what we ourselves, or our immediate surroundings, have experienced. That is why political solutions so often return to the familiar, the measurable, the proven – even though reality calls for diversity. We still lack a political model that truly accounts for the possibility that there may not be one best path – but many parallel paths, depending on who is walking them.

Too many times I have sat in rooms where new, major decisions were made. Where everything looked right. And yet something was off. I have seen how what cannot be said nevertheless governs. How unspoken tensions shape the direction of a meeting. How silence becomes action. And I have seen the price we pay when we do not listen. Projects that collapse. Organizations that implode. Decisions that wound because half of reality was never allowed to be present in the room.

When children see without words

In the much-discussed podcast The Telepathy Tapes, researchers talk about autistic children who communicate without words. On the surface, the podcast appears very serious, produced by a journalist and anchored in science and method, with one researcher in particular that the series keeps returning to.
As a listener, you step into a space that is equal parts wonder and doubt. How can this be possible? And if it is possible – why is it not something that plays a greater role in our conversations and shapes how we move forward? Because there is no research funding available. No university wants to carry the question. No career survives it.

And yet the parents say: “This is happening.” Here, the dilemma becomes visible: when the experience exists, in many people even – but the method is missing – the method wins. Academia closes the door. The phenomenon continues to live on the margins, free from proof, free from language.

Autistic children’s perception is often more sensorially open, less filtered, sometimes hypersensitive, more direct and precise. That their brains might perceive information differently is not unreasonable in the slightest. But it is a liminal phenomenon: difficult to measure, difficult to reproduce, associated with stigma, challenging the view of the brain as a “closed container”.

That the researcher receives no funding is entirely logical within the academic structure – but not logical in relation to reality. What makes this especially delicate today is that if we open up to the idea that research does not offer the whole of reality, then anyone – leaders, for example – can use this to guide people in destructive directions.

Paradigms

When academia cannot measure something, two things happen. Academia calls it “unscientific”. That is correct within its methodological framework – but that framework is not the whole of reality.

But people continue to experience the phenomenon. And so myths, spirituality, healing, shamanism, alternative medicine, intuitive practices, everyday experiences, crystal healing emerge. Separate phenomena.

This creates a kind of double reality: the measurable world and the experienced world. Neither of them is “more true”. But we have learned that only one of them is allowed to count. And when we refuse to listen to the other, it does not fall silent – it simply disappears from our language, from our institutions, from our collective ability to think about it and include it in the larger conversation.

I have lived in both worlds at the same time. Worked in organizations where everything had to be measured, proven, followed up – while knowing that the most important decisions were made on entirely different grounds. A sense that something was right. An intuition about who needed to be in the room. A silence that said more than any words. But it was never allowed to be spoken aloud. It was never allowed to become part of how we governed.

So we stole time. Took detours. Called intuition “experience” and feeling “gut instinct” – words that were acceptable enough to pass. But it was never honest. And it was never sustainable.

When physics begins to sound like mysticism

But at the outer edges of physics, something radical begins to happen: The observer affects the observed. Particles communicate without contact. Time and space behave like playgrounds. Matter is vibration, frequency, energy.

Suddenly physicists and spiritual practitioners are saying almost the same thing – but in different languages. When quantum physicists talk about entanglement, many people recognize it: “Yes, that’s what it feels like when I know my friend is thinking of me.”

Quantum physics is the branch of science that most radically undermines our everyday worldview. It shows that consciousness affects matter. That communication can occur beyond language and distance. That everything is interconnected. It sounds like prayer, healing, intuition, telepathy, synchronicity, rituals, “energy” and “vibration”. It is hardly surprising that people’s everyday experiences sometimes overlap more with quantum physics than with classical mechanics.

Two languages that have not yet learned to understand one another.

Crystals are used in watches, computers and radio transmitters precisely because they resonate stably. They have an ordered molecular structure that creates resonance. They respond to pressure, heat, electricity and magnetism. But when a person says that an amethyst brings calm, many people look at them strangely.

Why are we so afraid of the idea that matter might have properties that affect us subtly? Why is it hard to believe that vibrations and frequencies – fundamental physical phenomena – could also be felt in the body? If crystals are frequencies in the most literal physical sense, then it is not unreasonable to assume that they could have subtle effects on humans. It is simply difficult to measure.

The great blind spot: subjective experience

The academic ideal is objectivity. But much of what is most human is not objective: intuition, sensitivity, dreams, energy, creativity, love, telepathy between twins, human premonitions, healing relationships.

When academia says that subjectivity is not “reliable”, it is also saying: “The human being is a faulty instrument.” But what if the human being is the most advanced instrument we have? What if bodily signals, the images of dreams, the intuition that warns, the synchronicities that guide – are not noise, but information we have not yet learned to read? And what if they are also an entry point into understanding cognitive capacities that may serve a larger purpose for the whole? Perhaps not everyone is meant to experience everything, but everyone needs the right to their own subjective experience, and to be listened to.

I think of all the times I have felt something strongly – and not dared to say it. Because it sounded too diffuse. Too soft. Too subjective. What if I am wrong? What if it is just me? And so I said nothing. And later it turned out I was right. But by then it was too late.

That is the cost. Not only for me, but for all systems that leave no space for what is felt but not seen. The knowledge that is lost. The warning signs that are ignored. The possibilities that never get the chance to take form.

The breaking point: when the model cracks

Historically, reality has always been larger than our models. Long before we could measure bacteria, bacteria existed. Long before we could measure electricity, electricity existed. Long before we could understand the brain, people were already dreaming.

We think we are reaching the end of knowledge – but we are only reaching the limits of our instruments. The new paradigm begins exactly where the old one ends. And right now, we are standing there. In the crack. Where more and more people experience phenomena that academia cannot explain – but that keep happening anyway. Where science says “impossible” at the same time as life says “but it happened”.

I feel it myself. That crack. Living with one foot in each world. Knowing that both are real – but that no institution yet acknowledges that they can coexist.

A new kind of knowledge

Perhaps the knowledge of the future is neither purely rational nor purely mystical. Perhaps it is relational: a dialogic state between what we can measure and what we can experience. Science is one language. Spiritual experience is another. But they coexist, in the same room, without being in conflict. They are simply two different ways of seeing the same world from different directions.

The real problem is not that some things cannot be explained, but that we stop believing it is even worth trying. So perhaps what we need is a certain kind of courage. The courage to affirm what we notice even when we cannot measure it. The courage to listen to stories that do not quite fit within our own lived reality, and to acknowledge that reality has always been more than our theories.

The courage to say: “I don’t know what this is – but I take it seriously.” Because that is where all real knowledge begins. To allow multiple worlds to exist at the same time, where we stop choosing one path over another and train our capacity to understand what it means to be human. And perhaps that can lead us to live in a world that is larger, stranger, and more alive than we have allowed ourselves to believe.

And perhaps that is exactly what we are facing now: not a new answer, but a new way of listening. To science – yes. To the body. To the dream. To the story. To what cannot be seen, but can be felt. To begin seeing the whole human being as a carrier of information – not only through data, but through experience, resonance and relation.

Perhaps we need a new kind of institution – one that does not choose sides between mysticism and method, but listens to both. A conversation where physicists, doctors, shamans, programmers, children, dreamers and skeptics all have a place at the same table. Not to compromise – but to explore.

Because what is the alternative? To continue excluding what does not fit our models – even as people continue to experience it? Or to dare to believe that the next chapter of knowledge will not be about isolating – but about integrating.

We need people who sense shifts before they appear in data. We need people who see patterns that algorithms miss. We need people who dare to say “something feels wrong here” – even when they cannot prove it.

And we need systems that give them space to do so.

It is not dangerous to believe in more than we can prove. What is dangerous is allowing fear of the intangible to make our world smaller than it is.

Because that crack I live in – between the measurable and the experienced – does not exist only in me. It exists in all the systems we have built. In every meeting where half of reality is not allowed to be spoken aloud. In every decision where something essential is lost because it could not be quantified.

Perhaps the next chapter of knowledge is not about isolating – but about integrating. About stopping the choice of one path over another. About training our ability to hold multiple truths at once.

About allowing the world to become larger, stranger and more alive than we have permitted ourselves to believe. Because that is what it is. And always has been. We have simply stopped listening.

About this essay
We’re facing challenges that cannot be solved with the same logic that created them. In exploring our vast “knowing–doing gap,” I’m writing a book as a tool to help us see our inner and outer systems – and the friction between them. Like a compass, it offers a set of lenses or directions that can be explored individually or together.

“The immeasurable” is the fifth of these lenses. Here you can find the first four - Rythm, Position, Relation and Communication.

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Why don’t facts work anymore? It’s a question we keep coming back to. We have more information than ever, more scientific studies, clearer evidence – and yet we can’t agree on what needs to be done. Polarization is growing. People talk past one another. Conversations stall. Some see systemic collapse coming – ecological, economic, social – and shout warnings about what will happen if we don’t act now. Others hear only threats to everything they hold dear.

This is often explained as differences of opinion. As political conflict, ideology, values, or a lack of knowledge.

But research points in another direction. It’s about the nervous system. About how different people quite literally perceive different realities. About the fact that we are biologically calibrated for different things. Some nervous systems are built for openness – for detecting change early, navigating uncertainty, moving into the unknown. Others are built to preserve what works, protect the group from dissolving too quickly, keep identity intact.

In evolutionary terms, both were necessary. In today’s society, we have turned them into enemies.

I want to explore the tension between the open and the closed. Between intuition and analysis. Between diversity and conformity. Between purpose and growth. Between the group and the individual. In earlier texts, I have written about the primal group – about how we have broken the sequence that holds collective intelligence together – and about the wayfinder, the function that sees first, senses the future in the body, the one who is like me. But to understand why the world feels stalled right now, I also need to understand the guardian. The one who holds. The one who slows things down. The one who protects.

Because it turns out that the wayfinder and the guardian are not opponents. They are a pair. And when they lose contact with one another, both they – and the world – are lost.

This is where the story begins.

The guardian I carry within

I can’t write from inside the guardian the way I can write from inside the wayfinder. I can only approach him through observation, through attempts at empathy, by sensing what happens in me when we meet.

For me, the world has always seemed built for him. For what can be measured, categorized, controlled, repeated. For what is already recognized. For what follows lines, rules, schedules, definitions. I stand somewhere else – in possibility, in the in-between spaces, where things don’t always have language yet. Where change is felt as desire in the body before it can be explained.

That is why every change I have tried to bring about has felt like a struggle. Changes agreed upon from many directions have still proven impossible to carry through, because they move toward a system whose primary task is preservation. And the harder I have pushed, the tighter the system has closed around itself.

Over time, I have internalized the guardian. I hold inner conversations with him every day. He is there when I wake up, when I write, when I pause. When I doubt. And especially when I rest. Then he sits down beside me on the sofa and stares. Not with anger, but with a kind of matter-of-fact disappointment. As if he knows what I ought to be doing, and is waiting for me to realize it myself.

He has never introduced himself by name, but I know who he is. A composite of people I have met over the years, all speaking with the voice of authority. Of systems. Of rational realism. And yes, I have always imagined him as male, because his qualities so clearly align with what we tend to label as masculine: control, order, discipline, boundaries, performance.

It’s not that I never do what he tells me to do. On the contrary. I have spent my entire life trying to fit inside his frame. Creating structure. Delivering. Completing. I have been admired for my ability to be clear, but it has often been a shell I built to survive. The guardian in me demands it. He demands that I prove my right to exist through productivity, usefulness, reasonableness.

What is strange is that it is both a struggle and a dependency. He holds my day together. He defines what is real. And in a world where my own signals are often subtle, emotional, rhythmic, fleeting, it can sometimes feel safe to have him there. It is like living with both fire and ice in the same body.

I understand that the guardian reacts to me because I instinctively react to him. Immediately. A tightness in the chest. Something closes me off. I can’t imagine that this is something I have chosen, or something shaped by experiences I have gathered over time. This is who I am.

The attempt to understand

I lived for a long time inside this conflict without understanding it. I saw the guardian as an adversary. As the force holding the world back, standing in the way of everything that needed to change.

But when I first encountered research on neurological differences - on how the amygdala responds differently to threat, on how some nervous systems seek novelty while others seek safety - it felt like a release. I began to understand myself differently. To see that my openness is not a marker of performance, but a biological configuration. That my need for movement and change is not restlessness, but the way my system orients itself in the world.

I also began to understand the guardian differently. To see that his resistance is a nervous system doing exactly what it is meant to do: protect, preserve, warn of risk.

And in a way, I could also release myself from a certain burden of responsibility - the idea that the planet’s problems are necessarily mine to solve. At least not by focusing only on solutions that make sense to me. Because if half of humanity cannot take them in the way I present them, then it isn’t only their problem. It is also mine.

So, carefully, I’ve begun trying to sit in the guardian’s chair. Because I’m starting to sense that if I don’t understand him, he won’t understand me, and together we understand nothing at all about how the world actually works.

I try to see the world through his eyes. I listen to the kind of news broadcasts aired in prime time, with headlines about violence, chaos, ever more boundary crossings. I read comment sections where anxiety is expressed bluntly and without filters. I notice how advertising speaks. I observe which cultural expressions might feel foreign or threatening if you don’t already feel at home in them - new pronouns, new family structures, new ways of organizing work or community.

I try to summon this within myself. Moments when I have felt genuinely unsafe, when the world moved too fast for me to keep up. When my identity felt questioned. I notice how the body reacts then. How I close in on myself. How clear thinking becomes impossible.

If a constant biological signal were moving through my body, telling me that the speed of change is too high for my nervous system to integrate without breaking, I would not be myself. I would be someone else. Someone who has to protect themselves.

When the world moves faster than identity can keep up, the body reacts. That is what the research shows. And that reaction is not irrational. It is functional.

And the question I have carried for years - “How can they not see what’s happening?” - begins to answer itself. It isn’t a choice for him. He doesn’t choose not to see. He can’t, because the way I speak prevents him from doing so. Because I am standing in a different place in my thinking process than he is.

And I begin to understand. I don’t agree. But I begin to understand. I find it uncomfortable. But I begin to understand.

Why they can’t see each other

What has been most decisive for me - what has opened something entirely new - is not only what they see differently. It is when different questions arise in their thinking. That the root of polarization is not necessarily what we think, but the order in which thinking begins.

The open nervous system can zoom out. It can see itself from the outside and perceive the world through patterns, possibilities, the future. It handles abstraction, complexity, and meta-perspectives with ease.

The closed nervous system zooms in. It experiences the world from inside the body - through identity and safety. Through proximity, order, and the concrete. It has a harder time shifting perspective, a harder time engaging with abstract threats, a harder time perceiving systemic risks that are not tangible.

Research also shows that people with a more closed or conservative orientation, on average, react more strongly to threats - anxiety, conflict, norm violations, social instability. And this is not a flaw. In evolutionary terms, this kind of nervous system is precisely the one that notices when the group is starting to unravel, reacts to change that comes too fast, and prioritizes order over experimentation.

In early human groups, both were necessary. The wayfinder lit the fire. The guardian made sure it didn’t burn the camp down. They were a pair, not enemies.

But it isn’t only what they see that differs. It’s when different questions enter their thinking.

We often assume that people share the same mental starting point when something happens - a new fact, a threat, a proposal for change - and that differences emerge later in the reasoning. But for many people, it’s the opposite. The difference is already there in the very first moment, in which question is activated first.

In deeper psychological theories of cognitive functions, this has long been described as the sequence in which different kinds of questions arise when we try to make sense of the world. And that sequence matters.

For the wayfinder, the first impulse is often: What is possible? What is coming? What pattern do I see? For the open orientation, the future question comes first. Possibility. Risk. Direction. Only later - often much later - does the question of how this will actually work in everyday life appear.

For the guardian, the first impulse is the opposite: What do we know? What works? What is safe? What are we at risk of losing? Reality must feel stable first. Facts need to settle. The consequences for one’s own life must be graspable. Only then is there room to lift the gaze.

What is crucial is that these questions are not merely prioritized differently - they arise at different moments in the thinking process.

The wayfinder may have moved past the “what works today?” question in three seconds and already be deep into “what might happen in five years.” The guardian is still in “what does this mean for my life right now?” and has not even reached the future question yet.

This is where the misunderstanding emerges. When the open orientation speaks about the future, it often experiences the closed one as unwilling to see. But the closed orientation is still in an earlier step of thinking. When the closed orientation insists on concreteness and order, the open one experiences this as backward or insensitive. But the open orientation has already passed this step and experiences it as self-evident.

So when the wayfinder speaks of climate collapse, she is calling out from step seven in her thinking sequence. The guardian is still at step two and experiences being skipped over, ignored, or blamed for not “seeing.”

But the guardian cannot see at that moment - not because he is stupid or unwilling, but because his thinking does not begin there.

Research shows that moral intuition comes before rational thought. We feel first, then we explain. And for the guardian, certain moral values are not just important; they are structuring. Loyalty to the group. Respect for authority and tradition. A strong attachment to what has carried the group through history. These values are not secondary. They are foundational. And they must be in place before abstraction can be taken in.

Understanding these cognitive sequences is therefore a prerequisite for being able to speak about change at all without tearing one another apart. If we want the larger conversation to move forward, we have to stop speaking as if everyone is standing in the same place and start asking: which step are you in right now - and what would need to happen for you to take the next one?

Only then can the future become shared.

When conversations get stuck at the wrong step

There is a widespread feeling that we talk more than ever, yet still get nowhere. Climate, migration, the economy, democracy – the conversations are intense, emotionally charged, often technically sophisticated. And still, we remain stuck.

Today, much of the public conversation is led from the earliest stages of the sequence. From seeing, pattern recognition, and future analysis. From abstraction. From warning. These perspectives are necessary, but they are not sufficient. When they meet people who are in later stages – where the questions are instead about safety, identity, and continuity – the result is not dialogue, but friction.

This is why facts so often bounce off. The information addresses the wrong step in the other person’s process. It says “look at this,” when the receiver is really asking “what does this mean for my life?” or “what am I about to lose?”

Research shows this clearly: when information is experienced as threatening a person’s identity or group belonging, resistance increases. That is how the nervous system defends itself.

In a functioning context, there are roles that hold the sequence together. Someone who translates early seeing into shared meaning. Someone who creates enough safety for change to even be considered. Someone who negotiates between what must be preserved and what must be transformed. When these functions are missing, the same voices try to do everything – and fail.

What then appears as political polarization is in fact a systemic effect. We have lost the functions that allow different steps in the thinking sequence to meet and complement one another. Instead, wayfinders and guardians are forced to shout at each other across a widening gap.

If we were to dance

So what might the guardian invite me into? A kind of stability, perhaps. An ability to hold on to routines, to find joy in traditions and order. A grounding weight. A capacity to see risks I tend to overlook - practical risks, human costs, consequences my rapid pattern-seeing misses.

A stronger sense of group identity. A deeper responsibility toward what already exists, toward the people who already live here, toward the structures that do function, even if they are imperfect. Someone who stays when everything else is moving. A grip on reality. The capacity to follow through. I open things up; the guardian brings them to completion.

And perhaps the guardian, in turn, could appreciate that I open the world and glimpse new possibilities. New ways of thinking about the future and about development. Maybe he wouldn’t have to carry the entire burden of risk alone if I could see it earlier and warn in time. I could contribute creativity and a touch of magic. A conviction that shows change can be beautiful, not only dangerous.

If we were to offer this to one another, if we were to move closer, I would do everything I could not to make him feel unsafe. I would slow down. I would be clear about what I see and why it worries me, but also about what I want to preserve. I would promise to listen. To think more carefully about consequences. To understand that my future must first become his present, before it can become our future.

Because I long for safety, too. And perhaps the guardian longs for more possibility.

When I understand this - really understand it, not just intellectually but in my body - something shifts in me. I stop seeing the guardian as an enemy. I begin to see him as the other half of what is needed for the world to work.

What people actually need

We are born with a biology and a sex that already shape parts of who we are and how the world will meet us. We are born into a family and a culture that imprint us early on. Over time, we develop values and norms, language and symbols. Some of us are tightly woven into the collective; others hardly at all. But beneath all of this, there has to be something that unites us - regardless of how we are wired, or which culture, ideology, or politics we identify with.

We all want to feel safe. Not necessarily comfortable, but stable enough to think clearly.
We want to belong. To feel at home in a context, in a place, in a community where we matter.
We want to feel needed. To know that our knowledge, experience, or presence makes a difference to the whole.
We want to live in a world that is comprehensible - where we recognize ourselves, and where change doesn’t move so fast that cause and effect dissolve.
We want meaning. A sense that what we create, protect, or build is connected to something larger than ourselves.

These are human needs that have remained the same for thousands of years. If we were to pause there for a moment - at what is shared beneath everything that divides us - something might begin to stir. Perhaps we would remember how humans shaped futures before there were words for civilization. How there were wayfinders who sensed where the group needed to move, observers who felt shifts before they had language, storytellers who wove experience into meaning, guardians who protected, actors who translated everything into action and everyday life, and leaders who could hold all these forces in balance.

Then we might remember that we were never meant to be competing individuals, but complementary roles.

And perhaps it is in the meeting between the wayfinder and the guardian - when they finally see one another again, not as enemies but as halves of the same whole - that we can begin to find our way back to ourselves.

I'm writing this into a book called The Starting Point. If this text meant something to you, your pre-order helps make that real. And it tells me I'm not alone.

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Hilma af Klint painted the invisible long before anyone understood what she was seeing. In the early twentieth century, she created hundreds of works devoted to dualities: masculine and feminine, matter and spirit, chaos and order, the open and the closed. Her paintings did not treat opposites as enemies, but as pairs - held in relation, dependent on one another.

Here, opposites appear not as fixed positions, but as movements: emergence and dissolution, expansion and contraction, order giving way to excess and returning again. Colors, spirals, and forms drift between control and flow. The duality is not tense or confrontational, but rhythmic - like breathing.

Hilma lived with the conviction that reality cannot be explained, only experienced. That there are forces, patterns, and connections beyond the rational - and that these unseen structures still shape how we live, orient, and make sense of the world.

I can’t prove that what I write is true. But I can’t dismiss how true it feels - in my own experience and in the patterns I keep noticing. I offer this as a possibility, not a claim.

There are those who hear a shift in the air before chaos breaks out. Who sense a room, see patterns, and connect threads before others do. Who feel when something is about to go right, or very, very wrong. In the best of worlds, they are called visionary, inspiring, engaging, unexpected. In the worst: vague, intense, unrealistic, too sensitive, or unpredictable.

They are often found in the arts, at the edges of organisations, in academia, activism, tech, and the creative industries. Sometimes in executive offices, but more often in the spaces in between.

What I’m talking about here is not a personality type. It’s a function.

In early human groups, they were called wayfinders. Those who saw the path before it existed, and whose vision the group depended on in order to survive.

Today, this function is scattered, fragmented, often misunderstood. Many wayfinders are trying to find their purpose. Others gather with like-minded people, or search for ways to explain themselves clearly enough for the world to listen.

But the wayfinder is not a whole person. She is half. And I am one of them. I see patterns others miss, but forget to pick up parcels. I spot trends before they arrive, yet get stuck in the trivial. I understand systems and large civilisational shifts, but struggle with keeping things in order.

That is what a brain looks like when it is built for the future rather than for the present.

Living with constant pattern recognition is not a superpower. It is a strain. A nervous system with open gates, a radar that never switches off. When someone says, “You seem so present and in the moment,” I sometimes want to answer: “Yes, but it takes a day in the dark afterwards.”

Our rhythm is different. We are different.

And yet, for most of my life, I have tried to rationalise who I am. To sand down what is too wild, too much, too sensitive, too wrong. I have entered contexts with naïve energy and genuine will, only to leave them broken when the change we spoke of turned out to be too early to carry through.

But what if we shifted our focus to what actually works? What if we - wayfinders, observers, storytellers - dared to trust that our ways of perceiving the world are not flawed, but precisely what is needed now? The more I step into what I myself need to be, the more I need others. Because the more I trust my part in the whole, the clearer it becomes that I cannot carry it alone.

Reality still pulls at me, forcing me to show up as someone else. But when I shut out the external noise and listen inward, I don’t just hear myself. I hear the others too. I see my function in the whole.

Today, much of my social circle consists of people like me. We process what is happening in the world together, joke about whether we are all a bit mad, or at least somewhere on the spectrum - some diagnosed, others not. We wonder how the rest of the world cannot see what we see.

I also suspect that you are reading this because you recognise yourself. You sense the contours of the future too. You are afraid, and you feel that you are burning too much energy just trying to exist in a present that was never really built for you.

So when I use this text to sing the wayfinder’s praise, to emphasise the importance of being listened to and of being placed in a context, I also need to say this: I am who I am, no more and no less. I am not better because I happen to walk ahead. If anything, I am proof of why the model is needed. I am brilliant at some things and helpless at others. I only function when I am allowed to be with others who can carry what I cannot.

All my life, I have written with an inner opponent in mind. A voice that says: “You are too sensitive.” “You exaggerate.” “You see ghosts.” “You read too much into things.” “That’s not scientific enough.” “Who do you think you are?” But that voice belongs to a society calibrated for guardians, not wayfinders. A society that feels safe when the world is concrete, linear, measurable, and free of surprises.

Now I find myself wondering: what would happen if all wayfinders, observers, and storytellers took a different kind of responsibility, acted together, and allowed themselves to be exactly what they were meant to be?

That is the question I am trying to answer here.

The evolution of the group

I have written before about the sequence: the idea that the individual human being is not designed as a complete unit, but carries a part of something larger. A set of cognitive functions that, together with others, form a whole organism.

Before societies built hierarchies, there was always someone in the group who noticed shifts in the landscape, sensed changes in the mood of the collective, and detected threats long before they came close. In the earliest human groups, different nervous systems served different functions. Someone saw. Someone felt. Someone negotiated. Someone protected. Someone built. Someone held the group together. The wayfinder was first in a sequence that together carried collective intelligence. Every role was essential for survival.

Psychologists, anthropologists, and neuroscientists have long shown that some people have greater systemic sensitivity, stronger pattern recognition, more permeable nervous systems, and intuitive access to complex information. A kind of early radar for the group.

The wayfinder has always existed - in every culture, every era, every story of human change. Often unnamed, but always described in similar terms: the one who sees too early. The one who pays a price. The one who stands outside the community while being crucial to its survival.

In Greek mythology, Prometheus saw that humanity needed fire - a symbol of vision, knowledge, and the capacity to reshape the world. He was punished for being ahead of his time, yet humanity survived because he dared to see.

Cassandra could see the future more clearly than anyone else, but carried the curse of never being believed. Virginia Woolf wrote of minds calibrated to the frequency of the future. Nietzsche called them Seher - those who see - and reminded us that the visionary always walks ahead, and therefore often walks alone.

The pattern repeats itself: the wayfinder as both necessary and dangerous. Necessary for the group’s survival. Dangerous because her gaze destabilises what already exists. And so she is punished. Rejected, silenced, or isolated. The group needs her, but cannot always carry her. She sees what must change, but change generates fear.

This seems to be the core of the archetype: the wayfinder stands on the threshold between now and what comes next, between here and there. She does not fully belong to the world she lives in, because she already carries the next one within her.

Perhaps she is destined never to fully succeed on her own. Perhaps it is impossible to complete the sequence from a single vantage point. Because what the wayfinder seeks is not dominance, but balance. And as long as she stands alone, both she - and the world as we know it - risk being lost.

So perhaps the wayfinder’s task today is something more than seeing. Perhaps it is about understanding how knowledge of what is unfolding - on this planet, within humanity - needs to move through the whole group in order to be understood. To continue listening closely to one’s signals, while also inviting other roles to see alongside her. Not to shout louder, but to direct attention: Who can receive what I see? Who can help carry it forward?

The wayfinder is here to be first - but not to be alone. In early human groups, she stood at the front, yes, but always flanked. Always held. The observer felt her signal in the body. The storyteller gave it language. The negotiator created enough safety for others to approach it. The guardian tested whether it could hold. The actor made it real. The leader balanced the whole.

It is this sequence that now needs to return.

Different types of wayfinders

Today, many wayfinders stand without their sequence. They initiate, but the world does not change. Or they encounter resistance, which they interpret as personal failure rather than as a sign that something structural is missing.

The wayfinder is built for shift. For reading changes before they become visible. For asking questions long before answers are fully formed. But she operates in a society designed for clarity, performance, control, and measurability. Here, we are expected to deliver quickly, speak plainly, and show results on a quarterly basis. In that environment, the wayfinder’s competence fades into the background. Her ability to sense patterns, connections, threats, and possibilities is often subtle, embodied, intuitive. It comes before language and before evidence. But society does not listen to symbols.

Instead, many wayfinders channel their signal into other forms. Some experience callings, intense religious or spiritual states, speak of contact with the dead or with animals, telepathy, healing, crystals, tarot, or other ways of relating to something larger than themselves. Others create artistic works that feel as if they come through them rather than from them.

This does not mean that all of these expressions are convincing to everyone. But it does mean that something is trying to come through. That the signal is searching for a form. Often, these wayfinders gather in subcultures with their own symbols, languages, and markers. This can offer belonging, but also isolation. The codes that work inward rarely work outward. To the outside world, they may appear “quirky,” “a bit mad,” or simply incomprehensible. And in encounters with other wayfinders, especially those with a more rational orientation, the intensity can even be perceived as aggressive, closing doors rather than opening them.

All of this points to a larger truth: there is no single wayfinder. There is a spectrum.

A sensory, cognitive, and emotional ecosystem shaped by evolution to help the group anticipate, interpret, and navigate change.

There is the mythic, intuitive wayfinder who sees patterns in dreams, stories, cycles, myths, and synchronicities.
The visionary or strategist whose mind works in large patterns and long arcs, scanning scenarios and perceiving structures, processes, and consequences before they become visible to others.
The rebel who senses with sharp precision when something is wrong, and who reacts instinctively to abuse of power, threats to the group, and systemic imbalance.
The innovator who builds prototypes, tests models, starts projects, experiments, and demonstrates what is possible through action.
The sensitive who feels micro-shifts and atmospheres in relationships, in nature, and within organisations.
Or the rational wayfinder who detects signals in data, algorithms, trends, and statistics, grounding abstraction in what can be measured.

We have long tried to understand these differences. Personality frameworks such as Myers-Briggs, DISC, Big Five, or similar models may not be truths in themselves, but they are not arbitrary either. They are attempts to put language to this very thing: that human beings orient differently in the world. Some toward possibility. Others toward risk. Some toward the future. Others toward the present. Some through images, others through logic. These tools may offer an initial glimpse of where we operate within the whole. They can sketch the contours of a direction, an orientation, a kind of inner compass.

Wayfinders tend to move at the front edge. But only together with others can they create wholeness.

The Wayfinder and The Guardian

I will be honest: guardians have always frightened me a little. I have avoided them. I have moved with speed in my body, driven by passion, wanting to stay in flow with others. And I have looked at the guardian - the one who maintains order and protects tradition - as my opposite. Openness versus closure. Orientation toward the future versus the need for safety.

But in early human groups, we were not enemies. We were a point of balance. The wayfinder saw possibilities. The guardian saw risks. The wayfinder pulled the group forward. The guardian made sure it did not break along the way. The wayfinder lit the fire. The guardian made sure it did not burn down the camp.

It is modern society that has placed us in ideological boxes: left and right, progressive and conservative. But this is a misleading story. What has actually happened is that the sequence has been fractured. The wayfinder shouts louder. The guardian retreats further inward. Neither understands the other, because neither is working within the shared rhythm that evolution calibrated us for.

This fracture is visible everywhere - in climate conversations, in political polarisation, in the fragmentation of shared reality. The wayfinder tries to warn of systemic collapse using abstractions, data, and future scenarios, but only reaches half the population. The other half - those oriented toward order, concrete reality, and continuity - do not hear a future threat. They hear a threat to identity.

What we lack are the roles between us. The observer who can feel the fear in both camps. The storyteller who can translate the abstract into something tangible. The negotiator who creates enough safety for both sides to listen. These roles exist - but no one grants them mandate. And so we remain stuck.

When the sequence is broken, we also begin to shape the roles according to ideological norms.

In left-leaning and liberal environments, wayfinders are encouraged to see systemic flaws and speak about the future, about risk and possibility. Observers develop language around marginalisation, trauma, and vulnerability. Storytellers are given interpretive space and help form new narratives. The roles align with a self-image of change.

In right-leaning environments, by contrast, the guardian, the actor, and the leader are more highly valued. Stability, continuity, decisiveness. Here, the wayfinder’s signals are often perceived as destabilising, sometimes even disloyal. The observer’s sensitivity may be seen as excessive. The storyteller as dissolving norms.

But this does not mean that the right lacks wayfinders. On the contrary. In order to be accepted in an ideological landscape where safety is prioritised over uncertainty, the wayfinder function is often dressed in the language of strategy, technocracy, or civilisational theory. Talk of sensitivity is toned down. Intuition and future vision are expressed more as warnings than as possibilities. It is still the same function. But the form adapts to the culture.

That is why we need to understand both the wayfinder and the guardian as evolutionary functions, not identities. They are not enemies. They are pulse and rhythm. Expansion and structure. And we need them both - so that the world does not break apart as it moves forward.

The responsibility

I sometimes find myself torn between two perspectives: the wayfinder’s role in her local context - in organisations, projects, as a citizen, colleague, or leader - and her role in the larger, global picture. But regardless of scale, the same pattern appears. This is not only about ideas or strategies. It is about how change actually moves.

You see it in almost every change process. Visionary ideas are developed. Strategies are formulated. Goals are set, resources allocated, commitment is present. And yet, somewhere along the way, things stall. Momentum fades. The effort dissolves. Not because it was wrong from the beginning - but because change is not linear. It is not logical. It is biological. It requires interaction.

I think of all the processes I have been part of myself. How wayfinders, observers, and storytellers often find one another first, initiate movement, hold the vision, and carry momentum. But when no one else picks up the motion - when no actor acts, no guardian tests, no negotiator creates safety - the movement dies. The wayfinder moves on, often quietly, sometimes burned. And after a while, the loop begins again with a new group. The same force, the same ambition - the same pattern.

The only times I have seen real change take hold are when the wayfinder has not only initiated, but stayed. When she has had - or taken - mandate. When she has taken responsibility, not for everything, but for keeping the process open long enough for others to step in.

Because when that does not happen - when there is no one to receive the signal - a pattern emerges that is both biologically and psychologically predictable. The wayfinder begins to carry the entire change alone. She raises her voice. Tries to convince. Pushes her language, her body, her conviction, her nervous system to the limit. Not because she wants to - but because she feels alone. And then it comes: doubt. Guilt. The sense of having failed. The feeling of being mad.

Eventually, she burns out - not because of her vision, but because she was forced to carry it alone. She retreats to other wayfinders, isolates herself in bubbles, loses trust in the group, sometimes even in her own perception. The movement does not fail because it was wrong - but because it was alone.

So perhaps this is what is now required of the wayfinder: to invite other roles in from the beginning. To ask the observer, “How does this feel in the body?” To ask the storyteller, “How do we make this understandable?” To ask the negotiator, “How do we make it safe for more people?” To ask the guardian, “What must be preserved?” To ask the actor, “What is the next concrete step?” The wayfinder should not carry the change. She should initiate it.

This also requires a new kind of communication. One that speaks to the whole nervous system - not only to abstract, visionary parts. Not everyone understands future images, data, or scenarios. Not because they lack intelligence - but because their nervous system is calibrated for the present. For safety. Belonging. Concrete reality. The wayfinder must communicate rhythmically, grounded, close to the body. Not to simplify - but to enable.

For the first time in history, wayfinders across the world are connected. The internet has created a kind of global fore-time - a nervous system where we recognise one another, mirror each other’s images, and find strength. It is beautiful, but it is also risky. Because when wayfinders only mirror wayfinders, bubbles can form. Environments where we amplify one another’s fear, intensity, and direction - while losing contact with the larger whole.

We need groups - but not enclaves. Affirmation - but not isolation. The wayfinder should not build elitist future enclaves. She should build bridges.

Perhaps the hardest - and most important - thing to remember is this: time is not the same for everyone. The wayfinder lives in what has not yet happened. The guardian lives in what already is. Both are needed. But it is not the guardian who must adapt to the future. It is the wayfinder who must understand that the future does not become real unless it feels safe enough to be desired.

Speaking in the right direction

The wayfinder’s fire is often internal. It is sparked by a sensation: something is off. Something is shifting. Something is approaching that does not yet have a name. It is a powerful impulse, a kind of clarity, but also a loneliness. What do you do with a truth that others cannot yet see?

Perhaps the wayfinder now needs to step into a third form. Not the rebel. Not the prophet. But the weaver.

The weaver understands that seeing is not the task itself—it is only the beginning. She knows the fire must be directed, the message translated, the force given form. She does not work in opposition, but in the spaces between. She does not weave to persuade, but to coordinate.

Speak truth, yes, but in the right direction. To nervous systems, not only intellect. Create rhythm, not just argument. Embody safety, not only point to threat. Listen for language that has not yet formed. Allow symbol, body, dream, and direction to work together.

And understand that there are many wayfinders. Some see systems, others sense atmospheres. Some move through dream and myth, others through data and strategy. Each carries a part of the future. No one carries the whole. So the weaver’s work is to bind what is fragmented—to transform what we see into something others can also carry, in the way that works for them.

The Sequence that broke - and how we repair it

What was once an interplay has become fragmentation. The wayfinder, the observer, the storyteller, the negotiator, the guardian, the actor, the leader—these evolutionarily interdependent roles once functioned as a circular nervous system where no one carried everything, but everyone carried something.

Then came industrialisation. The linear model shattered the circle: the wayfinder’s intuition became “vague,” the observer’s sensitivity became a problem, the storyteller’s weave was cut, the guardian became an obstacle, the actor became a machine, the leader became a manager.

The spiritual weave - the sense of coherence, meaning, and direction - was severed. We call this secularisation. But it was also a loss of systemic intelligence.

Climate crisis, polarisation, exhaustion, loss of meaning. We see the symptoms, but not the system beneath them. It is the sequence that broke. And it may also be the sequence that can repair itself.

It is not a single wayfinder who changes the world. It is the weave. The weaver is not the one who stands highest or shouts loudest. She is the one who holds things together. Who sees the whole when no one else does. Who knows that all parts are needed, even those that have not yet found their place.

This is how the wayfinder stops walking alone. She turns around and invites others in.

When the wayfinder says, “I see,” and the observer answers, “I feel it too,” the first thread is set. When the storyteller gives it language and the negotiator makes it safe, the weave grows. When the guardian points to what must remain and the actor asks, “What is the next step?” it begins to carry.

Evolution already knew how. We simply lost the rhythm. But the weave remembers.

This is how civilisations change. Not by someone standing highest, but by enough people finding their place in the whole and beginning to move in the same direction, at the same time. This sequence is my compass now. And I believe we need it to find our way home.

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I write from intuition and experience, but I verify with research. What you’ve read is a synthesis of neuroscience, psychology, cognition, and anthropology—not ideology, but pattern recognition.

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There is a quiet conflict inside most of us. It can show up as inadequacy, fragmentation, stress, or shame. As a constant evaluation of the self where you rarely measure up. We think it comes down to personal flaws and try to compensate by chasing different ideals, or by cultivating the idea that romantic love can make us whole. We embark on self-improvement projects, self-help literature, discipline, methods.

The idea that this problem might not be individual but structural has already been explored by many - but what if it is simply biologically impossible to be “whole” in the way modern society demands?

Our time tells you to hold everything: you should be visionary and practical, sensitive and steady, fast and thoughtful, strategic and present. But humans aren’t built to contain all these functions at once. That role profile is evolutionarily improbable. We were never designed to be everything simultaneously. Evolution never gave us the conditions to become whole as individuals – but it did give us the possibility to become whole together. In a group. Designed to be different parts of something larger. And if intelligence was never meant to reside in you alone, then the question becomes: how does it move between us, and how do we organise around that?

The sequence that fell apart
The problem today is not a lack of collaboration - we collaborate constantly. The problem is that we collaborate in structures that were never built for the kind of group we were meant to be. Modern society broke apart the evolutionary original group and placed us in new formations – professions, identities, organisational charts, roles designed for production rather than survival. The belonging our cognitive functions are built for disappeared. Fragmented. Roles that evolved over hundreds of thousands of years became overloaded, reinterpreted, marginalised, or misunderstood. At the same time we ended up with polarization, social unrest, identity crises, loneliness, and burnout.

So the individual is not broken. The system is misconfigured. We have been configured incorrectly for 150 years – in our eagerness to belong to the new world that emerged, we forgot how humans are actually built.

Anthropological and evolutionary psychology research points to this: humans didn’t survive because we were the same, but because we were different in the exact right ways – and those differences worked together.

The original group: a collective nervous system
When you study early human societies – from small hunter-gatherer groups to early villages – the same pattern appears. People lived in groups of 15–50 individuals where different cognitive specialisations complemented each other. These were not professions in the modern sense, and they weren’t personalities. They were functions.

In such a group, some people saw patterns in the future, others sensed atmospheres or carried stories and context from previous generations. Some held relationships together, some held on to the long-term, and some executed. And one or a few held the whole.

I imagine this interplay followed a rhythm. Change moved through the group. First the discovery, then the feeling, then the story – followed by reassurance, anchoring, action, and finally the whole. In other words: human intelligence wasn’t an individual trait. It followed a sequence.

In the modern world these ancient cognitive functions are forced into roles that don’t match their inherited evolutionary purpose. The observer is seen as too sensitive, strange, or loud; the wayfinder becomes someone who disrupts; the storyteller is reduced to a communicator; the negotiator ends up an administrator; the guardian is called conservative or selfish; the actor becomes overworked; and the leader becomes lonely. So it isn’t the people who have changed – it’s the sequence that has broken.

The wayfinder as an evolutionary function
It won’t surprise anyone who knows me, but I would identify as a wayfinder. So right now that function interests me the most. I have stepped away from the flock to point out directions in various ways my whole life. Sometimes people have listened, often they haven’t. I have undoubtedly pulled others into the land of possibility I see ahead – sometimes too many, because the world around us isn’t always ready for what we want to happen. And I myself have also been pulled by other wayfinders in different directions and lost things along the way for the same reasons. Together we have inhabited a kind of land of possibilities that feels completely reasonable to us.

There are several versions of us, and what unites us now is that we clearly see climate crisis or polycrisis as immediate threats to human survival. We have lived inside that reality for many years, shouting about what is happening, but feeling unheard. Some have given up. Slowly learning to try to embrace the collapse they believe will come sooner or later. It feels hopeless for many. You no longer feel at home in your own life. You become alienated among friends and at work, looking for new places to exist. Some wayfinders protest loudly, others focus on testing new solutions, a third goes deeper into the spiritual.

In some ways we differ, in others we are very similar, and perhaps we carry the same function: to notice what others do not yet perceive.

The problem right now is that wayfinders mostly talk to each other. They find each other, recognise themselves in one another, confirm worldviews, and feel belonging. Since the starting premise is that the world is heading toward collapse, this becomes the foundation everyone gathers around, and the shared grief lies in the fact that the rest of the world doesn’t see or understand. All of this is beautiful and meaningful, but it worries me that what is created inside these circles may never reach outward. Simply because wayfinders alone are not a group. Not a cognitive whole.

In what research describes as early societies, the wayfinder was one part of the group’s collective intelligence – not a leader, not the one who decided, not the one who executed. She was the one who saw ahead – from a kind of orientation the others didn’t have.

So what if it’s our sequence that is broken?

The climate crisis as an example of a broken sequence
Let me show you how such a broken sequence might appear in practice. In my filter bubbles people talk about climate as if the problem were information. As if more reports, clearer graphs, or louder alarms would make people change. But polarization only grows.

Here is what might be happening:
Wayfinders see the pattern. They see system collapse coming. They feel it in their bodies. They try to warn – using abstractions, data, future scenarios. But at best they reach only half the population. Research on morality and identity shows that human groups have always had two fundamental orientations:

The open orientation – focused on future, patterns, abstraction, change
The social orientation – focused on order, concrete reality, closeness, continuity

Both were needed. Both were forms of intelligence. Both helped us survive. But in modern society these two polarities have been torn apart. Which means that when the wayfinder cries out about climate collapse, one half hears a future threat – while the other half hears a threat to identity. When one group sees graphs proving system failure, the other sees a threat to stability, belonging, and order. And again – this is not a choice. It is how we are built.

This is where it becomes clear what is missing:
Where is the observer who can feel the fear in both groups and say: “I see you both”?
Where is the storyteller who can translate the abstract threat into something concrete and near – and the concrete need for stability into something that fits inside change?
Where is the negotiator who can create enough safety for the social orientation to listen to the open one – and enough balance or respect for the open orientation to speak freely?
Where is the guardian who can hold both change and continuity – who can say: “We can change and still be ourselves”?

All of them exist, but perhaps they have no place in the sequence. No one listens to them. No one gives them a mandate.

So instead we may get:

• Wayfinders who shout louder (and thereby close the social orientation even more)

• Guardians who radicalise (and thereby dismiss the open orientation entirely)

• Observers who burn out (because they feel the pain of both sides)

• Storytellers who lose the power to reach out and weave things together

• Negotiators who barely exist because no one sees their role as critical

So what if it isn’t climate denial we are witnessing – but a sequence that has collapsed? If the sequence were intact, the climate crisis could become shared reality. The wayfinders’ warnings could be heard, the guardians’ need for stability could be met, and we would understand that all of this forms the ground for change.

But the sequence isn’t intact. And so we stand still.

When roles become isolated
What is happening now in society seems to be a systemic breakdown.

The wayfinders – the intuitive, the system-sensitive, the ones the modern world has placed on a spectrum, perhaps as ADHD or autism – are shouting louder and louder. Not because they want to disrupt order, but because they see the storm before others do. But no one listens. So they shout louder. Or fall silent.

The observers – the hyper-sensitive, empathic, trauma-aware – burn out. They carry the group’s dysregulated nervous system on their shoulders. They feel everything, but no one confirms it. No one says: “I see what you see.”

The storytellers drown in the attention economy, their depth reduced to “engagement”. Their role might once have been to create meaning – now they produce content. They might have been the ones to weave together what the wayfinder saw and what the observer felt.

The negotiators, who might have held safety and coherence, end up in HR departments where no one listens, or in sales roles.

The guardians feel the world cracking. They lose their sense of safety and fear anything unfamiliar. They drift to extremes to find order. They might once have carried continuity, ritual, and context.

The actors run. Build. Deliver. They fill the gaps left by everyone else. They might once have carried out what had already been secured, explained, and anchored. Now they build on unstable ground.

And the leaders? They sit at the top, alone, in a position evolution likely never meant a single human to hold. They were meant to sit in the centre, balancing the whole – but the whole is no longer there.

What we can do now
So if no one – or at least very few – can still do what evolution designed us for, then maybe this is the emptiness we are stumbling around in inside modern life. The conflict between what we sense we are meant for and what reality forces us to do. We became caricatures of ourselves. And the group we were meant to be – the people we need to connect with to form a cognitive whole – disappeared.

If the sequence were restored, would the world start working again? In theory perhaps, but the distance from here to there is vast. How do you even begin? Locally or globally – or both? Local feels essential, in the places where we already physically belong, but today we are like one giant global group – where biologically we might not actually be more unique than the original group, but history has given us cultural layers and experiences that differ. Routines, norms, ways of communicating that vary. But the thought that we are fundamentally very similar, and that we still strive to belong somewhere, gives me hope.

We are living in a time where:

• the climate crisis requires the wayfinders’ sight

• polarization requires the observers’ sensitivity

• the crisis of meaning requires the storytellers’ depth

• social anxiety requires the negotiators’ safety

• institutional crisis requires the guardians’ wisdom

• transformation requires the actors’ force

• and all of humanity requires leaders who can see the whole

So to me it feels obvious: we need to rebuild the group as infrastructure. Perhaps a parallel one. Like scaffolding. Or from a completely new position. But we need to bring awareness to it. A kind of infrastructure for human intelligence. To carry with us what evolution taught us, what research knows, and what we ourselves know intuitively. To remember what we might be made for – and build forward with that knowledge.

Maybe we are not broken on the inside. Maybe the break is in our construction. Which means we could begin again. Rebuild. This may be the starting point.

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This essay is part of my work on a book called The Starting Point – about reclaiming our inner and collective compass in a time when old systems no longer work. If this resonates with you, you can support the writing process and preorder your copy here.

The world as we knew it is becoming quiet in a way that feels unfamiliar. We speak more than ever - messages, meetings, arguments, endless streams of text - but the words don’t quite make it through. They bounce back, fall sideways, turn into misunderstandings. We say the same things but mean different things. And in that silence - where the words remain but contact is gone - something essential fades.

An ecosystem survives through communication. The bird knows it, sending one call or wingbeat through the flock and within seconds hundreds of bodies turn as if they were one. The tree knows it, sending chemical signals through its roots when danger approaches so the neighbours can prepare their defences before the attack arrives. The whale knows it, singing across an ocean so its family can stay together.

And humans? We’re no different - only more complex. Our language was born to bind us together, to keep us alive. At first it was a rhythm between mouths and bodies reading danger before thought had time to form. A tone that soothed an infant, a touch that softened the pulse, scents that signalled safety or threat. The first words were likely sounds carrying emotion - warnings, invitations, calls to return. A way of being together. Synchronising heartbeats. Finding one another in the dark. Creating the shared space where a “we” could form.

Researchers still disagree on when words arrived, but they mostly agree on why. Not to transmit information, but to hold us together. When our groups grew too large for constant physical closeness, we needed something else. A way to synchronise hunting, decisions, rituals. A way to speak about why we were here, together, and what it meant. Words became a new form of touch. A way to stay connected without sharing the same place.

Later, we learned to point to what wasn’t there - what was absent, what might come. The future. Death. Spirits. Law. The nation. We created shared fictions that held us across time and distance. We could speak not only of what had happened, but of what ought to happen. That was the magic of language.

When words became tools

As modernity took shape, the function of language shifted. We began to divide. Body from soul. Reason from feeling. Masculine from feminine. Right from wrong. Civilised from wild. Descartes formulated what became the foundation of the modern world: Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. But what happened to the body in that sentence? What happened to the heart, the breath, the pulse?

The body became something one had, not something one was. And language followed. It turned into a tool - but for what? We learned to separate professional words from private ones, rational words from emotional ones, legitimate words from the ones that felt too charged. In that split, something was lost: our ability to speak with our whole selves, with everything that actually moves us. The feelings remain, of course, shaping us constantly - but under the surface, out of reach, impossible to hold together with others.

I think about how this shows up at work. How we learn to say “challenging” when we mean “impossible”, “an exciting opportunity” when we mean “a crisis”, “feedback” when we mean criticism that hurts. As if the real words were too dangerous to use. As if contact between them might break something we’re trying to keep intact.

We built fields of knowledge. Medicine. Law. Economics. Engineering. Each field developed its own language - its own terms, symbols, codes. That gave us precision and a sense of belonging, but it also built walls. If you don’t speak the right language, you’re shut out.

Much of modern business language comes from the military and carries a worldview of hierarchy, command, territory, enemies. We crush competitors. We fight for market share. We attack new segments. We mobilise teams. Someone wins. Someone loses. Someone is sacrificed. But what happens to relationships when every conversation carries an undertone of battle, conquest, and victory? When the words don’t stay in the PowerPoint - they seep into the bloodstream, enter our dreams, whisper to our children what counts and what doesn’t.

What has no name

I’ve been collecting words from cultures other than my own for a long time without understanding why. Words that describe something deeply rooted in the place where the language emerged. Swedish has lagom - that gentle, almost instinctive sense of balance, not too much and not too little, but something that feels right in the moment. It only exists in relation to others, in a shared understanding of pace and proportion. A word shaped by a culture that has long trusted moderation as a way of living together.

Portuguese has saudade - a longing that is soft and deep at the same time, for someone or something that is absent, or perhaps never fully existed outside the heart. It holds grief and love in the same breath, like an echo that keeps resonating long after the source has faded.

Finnish has sisu - the steady force that moves a person forward when the world grows heavy. Strength, persistence, a quiet kind of courage that doesn’t announce itself, but shows itself in the way someone keeps going through winter after winter.

German has Fernweh - the ache for a place you have never seen, the pull toward an unknown horizon. A longing that feels both adventurous and tender, as if part of you remembers a landscape your body has yet to touch.

Zulu has ubuntu - the understanding that a person becomes a person through others. That care, responsibility, and belonging are threads of the same fabric. A way of seeing the world where generosity is not an act, but a way of being, and where reconciliation is woven into the everyday work of relationship.

All these words pull me in. Like poetry, they grip something deep inside. And it makes me wonder: what happens to a feeling that has no word? It doesn’t disappear, but it becomes invisible. And when it can’t be expressed, it opens a distance between me and everything around me.

We’ve lost vocabulary for the complex, the not-yet-formed, the things that aren’t yes or no. The things that are both grief and relief. Love and frustration. Our modern language rewards clarity, speed, unambiguity. But life is rarely binary. It’s contradictory, uneven, full of in-betweens. The things that matter most are hard to say - and even harder to measure.

There’s little room for doubt, for process, for what doesn’t yet know what it wants to become. And in losing the hesitant words, we lose something else: our ability to see ourselves and mirror one another. Because how can I understand what I feel if I don’t have words for it? And how, then, could I ever hope to be understood?

Exformation

We tend to imagine language as words, sentences, signs lined up in order. But when you listen - really listen, with the kind of attention you give to music or a flock of birds - you notice something else. Language is much larger than the words themselves. The real language lives in what isn’t said. In what gets filtered out. In everything resting between the lines.

Tor Nørretranders calls this exformation - the hidden background of experience, associations, memories, culture, and bodily knowledge that makes meaning possible in the first place.

When we speak or write, we do it with our entire inner landscape - feelings, thoughts, memories - and then we strip away almost all of it. What remains, the small distilled drop, is what we dress in words. But the words are only the surface. The depth lies in what we didn’t say. “Horse” isn’t just a noun. It’s childhood, fear, a film you once saw, the smell of warm fur, a memory of a meeting, something indescribable that unfolds in the listener.

That’s how powerful art works. A single well-placed word, a tone, a stroke of paint can carry whole worlds. They transmit ideas, feelings, states of being the creator once held - and awaken them in someone else.

Language works when two people’s associations overlap enough. When their worlds drift too far apart, it falters. We hear the same words, but they spark different images. The conversation comes undone. We think we’re communicating with words, but we’re really communicating our entire worlds.

When a society loses its shared stories, it also loses its shared exformation. Politics gridlocks. Families fracture. Public conversation becomes aggressive or hollow. The words no longer rest on the same ground.

What the body knows

But language hasn’t disappeared. The body still speaks. It knows things long before the mind can catch up. The stomach tightening when someone comes too close with an offer you don’t want. The neck tensing when your manager says “we need to talk”, even though the words sound neutral. The coldness in your hands in the middle of a presentation that is going well. The body reads rooms, reads people, reads danger and safety faster than consciousness can. Scents. Shifts in the air. A warmth or a chill you feel before anyone has said a word. How someone’s presence can make you open - or close. How a meeting can feel heavy even when everyone is saying the right things. How something can feel wrong without any clear explanation.

We sometimes call it intuition, but it’s really the sum of inherited and lived experience telling you what matters right now.

What does the body say that words cannot? The unspoken history families carry. The foundations an organisation rests on - old, unacknowledged rules, invisible power lines, unspoken agreements.

So how do we begin to speak again - truly speak? I think about the conversations that have changed me. They were never the most polished or prepared. They weren’t perfect. They simply happened, and they were true. Someone dared to say something that cost them. Someone held space for what was difficult. Someone stayed when it grew uncomfortable. Maybe that’s where we start. By letting go of performance. By speaking not to sound clever, or to be right, or to prove something. By daring to say: I don’t know. I don’t understand. I don’t feel at home here anymore.

Simple words, but hard to say. Because a living language demands what our modern language has trained out of us: vulnerability, presence, time. You can’t streamline connection. It asks us to stay. To listen. To listen intensely, so we can hear the nuance in others too.

The words we choose now

Single words build larger stories. Not too long ago, we shared a sense of the future. Progress meant something we all recognised. Technology would free us. Prosperity would grow. Each generation would live better than the one before. These were the promises that held societies together.

But the climate is collapsing. Ecosystems are dying. Inequality is rising. The future no longer feels shared, and we have few new stories about what we’re moving toward. We know far more about what we shouldn’t do than about what we must.

So which words do we choose now? Maybe we don’t need to return to what we’ve lost - maybe language itself is changing into something that doesn’t yet know what it wants to be. Because today’s world demands it. Feelings between people that don’t yet have names but still make us braver. Maybe we listen for the language that is forming. So we can rediscover, create, or reconnect with something new. Words that turn us into something other than what we are now. Not winners, but participants. Not words that create distance, but words that create closeness. Not words that shut things down because we’re in a hurry, but words that open. We need words for the in-between spaces. For the process. For what isn’t finished yet. For the complex things we can still feel. For what takes time. For what simply is.

We need a language for the regenerative - for what becomes true only in relationship. A language that creates presence.

We need a language for the living. Yes, we need the big narratives and manifestos, but that’s not where it begins. It begins in simple conversations. In the moments where we let go of who we think we need to be and choose to be present instead. Where we stop speaking about the world and start speaking with it - where we release our need to control and let language become what it was always meant to be: a way of being together. Weaving the world back together. Word by word.

About this essay
We’re facing challenges that cannot be solved with the same logic that created them. In exploring our vast “knowing–doing gap,” I’m writing a book called “The Starting Point” to help us see our inner and outer systems – and the friction between them. Like a compass, it offers a set of lenses or directions that can be explored individually or together.

“Words” is the forth of these lenses. Here you can find the first three - Rythm, Position and Relation.

If you want to support my work you can pre order the book here or you can explore it more deeply through your own life and context by joining 100 Days.

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The meeting

I’m not sure when it began, or how. Maybe they just slipped into my awareness, slowly making room for themselves. Suddenly they were simply there, walking beside me and the dog on our morning rounds. Two hooded crows, gently swaying as they moved, their eyes scanning the ground.

Maybe it was the pace. Minnie had grown old, and our walks had become slow and attentive. She could stop and stand still for a while, sensing the air, lifting her face toward the sun as if she were reading something in it. I started greeting the crows. One day I went home and looked them up. The next morning my pocket was filled with cat food. After a while I spotted them as soon as I stepped out of the building, waiting in the tree. The moment the door opened – sometimes just before – they would take off and fly toward me. Our rhythms had aligned. Breakfast, get the kid out the door, birds, walk.

More joined in. The jackdaws began arriving in small groups, and those with some kind of distinguishing feature got names. Ringen (The ring) is easy, because he’s marked. Pannan (Forhead in Swedish) is featherless on top of his head. Because they stood out, they learned quickly that it gave them advantages. Today, Pannan plants himself right in front, perfectly still, and when I meet his gaze or say his name, he starts to sway with excitement, lifting his little legs in a cheerful rhythm.

Studies show that corvids remember faces for years and teach their young which humans are dangerous or kind. When a crow lets you in, you become a point on their social map. Researchers have even shown that magpies recognise themselves in the mirror – a capacity found in only a handful of mammals.

Those who stood out

Hued (head in dialect Swedish) is the largest of all the hooded crows along the shore, moving with the kind of confidence that shows he sits at the top of the hierarchy. He fluffs himself up, lifts his tail feathers and looks enormous. I can spot him from far away, shooting in like a cannonball, scattering the others as he rushes toward me. He has a subdued mate who follows him everywhere, always a few steps behind. I know they belong together because I watched them feed their three chicks all summer. While Hued takes what he wants, she keeps her head low. She often trails me through the bushes, where the other crows don’t go, lowering her head as far as it will go, almost pleading. I always try to give her a little extra, because the moment the others arrive she is pushed aside.

Kompis (friend in Swedish) was born last summer. He grew up watching me feed the flock every day and has no fear at all – maybe a little too little. He makes himself known by tapping me on the head with a wing or hooking a claw lightly into my hair, a kind of bird high-five. Quick, precise, insatiable. While the others settle for what they get, he always wants more. Once his beak is full, he flies off to stash the food, then returns for another round. And then one day he disappeared. I didn’t see him for months. But after we said our final goodbye to Minnie, I walked farther along the sea than usual, and suddenly felt a wing brush the back of my head. He had only changed territory. Now we meet every morning again.

There are more individuals I recognise, but it’s the collective that fascinates me most. The way they move in sync, call out to each other, make room or claim it. I sometimes wonder if they even see themselves as individuals, or more as a shared body moving through the world.

Over time, my way of seeing has shifted. I notice things I struggle to put into words, even to myself, yet they are unmistakable in my body. The sound of wings catching air, the way they move around me, how close they dare to come. How eagerly they hop, how the rhythm of their steps differs. How the wingbeat of a jackdaw carries a different pulse than that of a crow.

New sounds have entered my soundscape. Hard cat food against beak. Soft calls. Voices that greet and thank, creating a sense of closeness. My attention deepened.

None of this would have been possible if I hadn’t allowed myself to stand still. Layer by layer, things revealed themselves until the birds and I found a frequency that belongs only to us – one I can’t imagine being without now. I have tried to capture it on camera or show it to others, but the moment something shifts, the frequency dissolves. It only exists when I am fully present.

Biologists have begun mapping the sound of wingbeats and discovered that they are as individual as voices. A young bird’s wingbeat sounds different from an older bird’s; a jackdaw’s rhythm is distinct from a crow’s. If you listen long enough, it becomes like recognising someone by the sound of their steps on an old staircase.

Who eats first

I’m learning about hierarchies. The hooded crows rule, yet the jackdaws move in small gaps where the crows aren’t paying attention. When there’s plenty of food, the crows may even stand by and watch the jackdaws eat. They seem to be able to count.

The rooks are different. Their energy is something else entirely. They keep to the edges, solitary but curious. Every now and then one of them breaks through the crowd and makes an attempt at getting food. Sometimes I distract the flock in one direction so I can isolate Håkan – the rook with the twisted foot – and give him his chance.

I’ve learned about territories. Which birds live where, where the borders lie, where new ones take over. Hooded crows have smaller territories than the jackdaws, who move higher and over larger stretches. Fights only happen initiated by crows or between the crows, and when they do, it’s in the border zones.

Each species moves in its own way, yet they move together. Predictable in some ways, surprising in others.

I’ve learned how they relate to weather. How they love wind, how they lean into it, how they hover in front of me so I can toss food forward instead of dropping it to the ground.

Researchers have found something in corvids once thought to be uniquely human: culture. In Japan, crows use cars to crack nuts. In Australia, cockatoos teach each other how to open garbage bins. A behaviour begins with one bird – weeks later it is custom.

What I forgot I already knew

Memories surface. Haven’t birds always been there, even if I never paid them much attention? When I was little we went to the bay on weekends to feed the ducks. It was one of my favourite things. My mother put old bread in a plastic bag and I carried it proudly as we walked to the shore. Putte, my blue budgie. The gulls fighting over fish scraps outside the cabin in the early mornings, their cries woven into the soundtrack of summer. Swallows under the eaves. Storks walking proudly across the fields.

The cranes. Two of them started nesting near our house when we lived in the countryside, marking the seasons. Some autumns they flew back south on their own, other years they had become a small family of three or four. Spring arrived with the cranes. The joy every time they called near the house and I could sneak closer and watch them. One February morning, just after I returned home from the hospital, hundreds of them landed in the field outside – like a secret ceremony or a private sign that life could go on.

But the birds have shifted from something I merely observe to something entirely different. When I step out of the apartment, I belong to them. I don’t want to think about anything else, and preferably not talk to anyone. It’s as if an alternate reality opens, one that exists all the time if you just pause. It becomes a form of meditation. I can’t be disturbed. I notice my breathing slow. My back straightens, my shoulders drop. When a wing brushes my cheek, it feels like the wind greeting me. And the feather-light weight of a bird landing in my hand stays with me long afterward. So light. So soft.

As a child I was taught never to project human feelings or qualities onto animals. That what they expressed was closer to reflex than emotion. Yet years with animals have taught me the opposite – we share the full range of feelings. And even if we don’t have a common language, we share presence. A small movement of my hand toward my pocket, and they understand. A certain tilt, a sound, and I understand. A quiet conversation where time falls away.

In Japan, the crane is a symbol of life and hope – you fold paper cranes for peace. In Norse mythology, Hugin and Munin, two ravens, were thought and memory.

Glances

Being a bird-friend in the city is a challenge. I understand how it looks when I’m out on the field with forty birds around me – I’ve seen the photos of women surrounded by pigeons in Venice. In the beginning I almost braced myself, preparing sharp replies in my head. Should I joke? Distance myself? No. That’s the easy way out. “I love birds, they’re my friends” is simpler and truer.

Joggers wave their arms, dogs chase. Most of the time I don’t care anymore, but sometimes I meet a glance – an older woman on a bike, full of irritation. I know exactly what she’s thinking.

But far more often, someone approaches. They say something about the birds and suddenly it turns out they also feed them, have favourites, spend time with them, put up feeders. It becomes a way into unexpected conversations about French philosophers, death or this place. We’re stripped down – no idea who the other person is, what they’re called or how they move through the world otherwise – yet we meet again and again in the finest of exchanges. Thanks to the birds, it’s as if I now see my fellow humans differently, even the ones who were impossible to distinguish at first glance.

Nutcrackers can remember thousands of hidden nuts and exactly where they are – even months later. Researchers call them “the most advanced memory machinery in the bird world.”

Staying somewhere

Not everyone needs to feed birds. But I do believe we all need new ways of experiencing the world. Ways of becoming still enough for other layers of life to reveal themselves. Ways of hearing a different kind of intelligence. Ways of feeling belonging.

I never intended to become a bird-friend. I wasn’t looking for meaning, practice or belonging. It was Minnie’s old age that slowed me down just enough for the birds to find their way in. And now I can’t imagine myself without them. I don’t know if it’s freedom or dependence. Maybe it’s the same thing.

What I’ve learned is that every place holds countless layers, if you stay long enough. At first it’s just a beach, a patch of grass, a park. Then something moves – one bird, two, an entire flock. Then they start to have faces, voices, patterns of movement. Then they gain stories, relationships, hierarchies. Each new layer requires me to stay a little longer, and with every layer that opens, something in me opens too. A sense of grounding. A feeling of belonging not just to a place, but to the world.

Researchers talk about how corvids remember faces for years, how they have culture and social maps, how their wingbeats are as individual as voices. But I didn’t need that knowledge to feel it. The knowledge came after the relationship, as a confirmation: yes, what you’re experiencing is real. They see you. You see them. It’s mutual.

The world is changing in ways that are hard to grasp. We talk about the large things – the climate, ecosystems, the future. But I think the ability to stay with the large begins with the ability to stay with the small. To learn to notice what is right where you stand. To understand that a place isn’t a backdrop but a web of relationships. That what lives there – the birds, the trees, the weather, the light – isn’t decoration in my life but partners.

For me it happened to be birds, but it doesn’t have to be. It could be trees changing through the seasons. Insects moving through the grass. The way light falls at different times of day. A neighbour you’ve never really seen before. Anything that requires repetition, presence, patience. Anything that asks you to go deeper instead of wider.

To go deeper and relate is to find a ground to stand on when everything else feels unmanageable. A place where the body knows where it is. Where attention can rest in something real, something happening right now, right here. It isn’t a solution to the world’s problems. But it is a way of being present in what is shifting.

I have the birds. It’s not grand. But it’s mine. It’s real. And it holds me in place in a way nothing else does.

Footnote: Of course I have no idea what sex the birds are – I only guess. What matters is this: they see me (and the food). I see them. And something opens in that meeting.

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About this essay
We’re facing challenges that cannot be solved with the same logic that created them. In exploring our vast “knowing–doing gap,” I’m developing a tool to help us see our inner and outer systems – and the friction between them. Like a compass, it offers a set of lenses or directions that can be explored individually or together.

Relation is the third of these lenses and this is a deep dive into what that means to me. Here you can find the first two - Rythm and Position.

You can subscribe to follow this work, or explore it through your own life and context by joining 100 Days.

For more writing from the edge where an old world fades and a flickering new one begins – visit WEAVE.

Something has broken - not only within me, but in the landscape I move through. The world I once could mirror myself in, find comfort in, and lean my future against no longer feels like home. It is not just the news, or the reports about the climate, the economy, or politics. It is something deeper - a sense that the very foundation has cracked. That the shared agreements holding reality together no longer apply.

We speak past each other, as if we no longer share the same reality. What I see and cannot unsee seems invisible to others. And the world most people still seem to live in - with its calm sense of safety and faith in the future - feels like a time I no longer belong to.

The conversations - public, professional, private - no longer hold. When societies decay, this is where it begins: in relationships. Trust erodes, language hardens, resonance fades. Civilisations do not first show signs of collapse in their economies or political systems, but in their capacity for empathy. When we no longer feel with each other, when we stop listening, when dialogue turns into posturing - then the system has lost its soul.

This is why the way we relate to one another is not a private matter. It is the foundation itself - and we need to start treating it as such.

Relationships running empty

And now, when we need one another the most, we drift apart. I often hear people speak about the pain of no longer feeling close to those once nearest to them. About insights that have not yet reached the people they love - creating cracks and friction. About not being able to express what feels most important - because it is met with silence, defensiveness, or polite distance. The loneliness of standing in what once felt like closeness, realising that the conversation has thinned and the depth is gone.

We find ourselves participating in lives we have tried to leave behind - dinners where no one mentions what is happening, trips as if nothing were collapsing, conversations that stay at the surface because no one has the strength to go deeper. The talk becomes parallel monologues instead of true encounters. We speak of the same things, but from different realities. The words are the same, but their meanings have split apart.

How do you communicate that? How do you say: “I love you, but I can no longer be who I was - and the person I am becoming seems to frighten you”? How do we navigate when worldviews begin to diverge? When the way we understand reality is no longer shared with those we once moved in rhythm with?

Some relationships sustain the old order. They ask you to play a part, to behave a certain way, not to go too far, not to ask the harder questions. And the grief becomes double - not only for the relationship as it was, but for the version of yourself that could exist within it.

So we start searching - for new spaces where we can feel seen, where others too recognise what is unfolding, where we can make sense of it together. And there we stand - with one foot in the old relationships that sustain who we were, and one in the new, where we might begin to become whole again.

We become through others

For centuries, we have built a culture around the autonomous human being - the one who can manage alone, who needs no one, who is whole in themselves. We have celebrated individuality as freedom, independence as strength, and self-sufficiency as maturity. But that is a lie - or at least a crude simplification. We have overvalued the individual and undervalued the collective.

We are not separate entities. We are parts of larger, often invisible constellations. We do not exist in a vacuum - we take shape through the relationships we inhabit. Where we place ourselves and how we relate determines who we become, in that moment. You are one person with your parents, another with your partner, a third at work, a fourth with a friend. That is not being false or fragmented - it is human nature. We are relational beings. We mirror each other. We create each other.

Hermann Hesse wrote: “In truth, not even the most naïve ego is a unity, but a thousandfold multitude, a miniature starry sky, a chaos of forms, stages and states, inheritances and possibilities.”

Sometimes we are whole and radiant; in other contexts, we are incomplete - or even harmful to ourselves and others. What you see in me is the person I become. Who I am in relation to determines how I perceive myself - and what I then do or fail to do.

Some relationships help us unfold. Others make us shrink. Some awaken the best in us - others reinforce the worst. This does not mean the other person is good or bad - it means that the dynamic between us creates a field, an atmosphere, a possible version of who I can be. This is not mysticism - it is how relational systems work. We regulate one another emotionally. We affect each other’s nervous systems. One person’s presence can calm you - or trigger your stress response. The dynamics of a group can help you think more clearly - or cloud your mind entirely.

Perhaps we are not even individuals - not fully. Perhaps we are parts of something larger - constellations, organisms, ecosystems - that breathe through us.

So instead of striving to become whole as individuals, we need to begin striving to become whole as groups.

Archetypes

Evolution did not shape us to be alike - but to be complementary. Not as isolated individuals, but as parts of small, cognitively diverse groups. We survived not because everyone could do everything, but because different people carried different functions - and together became something greater than the sum of their parts.

There is an ancient wisdom in this - something we instinctively long for but that modern individualism has reasoned away. We have words for it - diversity, group dynamics, self-help - but we rarely let it guide us. We do not go deep enough. Workplaces experiment with personality tests and typologies like Myers-Briggs - imperfect but pointing in the right direction - yet when the results come back, they are quickly sacrificed for what is seen as more important: efficiency, speed, uniformity.

If you want to build something fast, with a clear goal, sameness can be an advantage. Everyone speaks the same language, moves at the same pace, makes the same instinctive decisions. But from day one, you also build in fragility. When crisis hits - when the unexpected happens - the group lacks the perspectives it needs to survive.

The pathfinder who sees far ahead.
The weaver who binds things together when all seems to fall apart.
The caretaker who notices when someone is struggling.
The realist who says “wait a minute” when everyone else rushes forward.
The visionary who dreams when others have lost hope.
The rebel who questions what seems self-evident.
The craftsperson who gets things done.
The leader who keeps direction when no one knows where to go.

And yet, in our modern society, we are expected to be all of this at once - complete, self-contained, whole individuals. Capable, independent, balanced. As if each of us should be able to lead and follow, create and build, nurture and challenge, see the whole and manage the details.

It is not only unreasonable - it is impossible.

The search

Now, as the world no longer feels familiar and we begin to falter, we instinctively reach out to one another. We look for those who see what we see - who understand - who feel the same unease, the same cracks. And we find them, sometimes. But even here, a new problem arises.

It is not unlikely that many of those who sense the new patterns of our time, who feel the existential threat most deeply and want to act, belong to the same archetype: the pathfinders. The ones who, in ancient communities, read the signs in the landscape - changes in weather, danger, transformation - but who today have turned their lives toward identifying trends, formulating new ideas, innovating, communicating, breaking new ground.

So what we often find when we search - are other pathfinders. We gather in networks, in communities where we agree with each other, feel the same frustration, point in the same direction. And it is wonderful. To finally be seen. To stop explaining. To speak with people who do not stare blankly when you say what you see.

But a group of pathfinders rarely forms a whole. They share the same strengths - but also the same weaknesses. They see far, but sometimes carry poorly. They dream, initiate, challenge - but lack grounding, the ability to stay, to endure. They risk burning out - or burning each other out. In the worst case, echo chambers form: small homogeneous fields where ideas grow ever more extreme, and ever further from reality.

To build something that lasts requires something else: complementarity. But how do we get there, when we have learned to seek confirmation instead of balance? How do we create organic groups in a time when most roles are already written for us?

We have stepped into scripts we did not always choose ourselves: daughter, colleague, partner, leader. Roles that come with expectations, positions, rehearsed behaviours. We fill functions in systems drawn long before we were born - family systems, organisational charts, social hierarchies.

Modern organisations - and modern families - often function more like square cages than living organisms. They are designed for control, not for life. For predictability, not for movement. For roles, not for relationships.

And as long as we build our groups like machines - with interchangeable parts, standardised processes, and measurable outcomes - we will continue to feel lonely, even among people who understand us.

We have built our lives like grids, not like trees. We wear our roles like uniforms - not as chosen expressions, but as inherited ones. And when we try to create community, we often begin from position - not from relation.

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Local and sustaining relationships

Maybe this is where we begin - not by searching for perfect relationships, but by noticing the ones that truly carry us.

Look around. What is close by? Are there people who seem to move in the same direction - not necessarily with the same words or methods, but with the same longing for something else? And if not - which new relationships need space to grow?

It is not about relationships that always affirm you, but about relationships that can meet you. That see you. Where presence matters more than perfection, and mutuality weighs more than performance. Relationships honest enough to hold conflict without breaking the bond.

To see and work with relationship deeply is to pause and really feel - which connections give energy, and which drain it? It is something we have heard for decades in the world of self-help, but usually with the goal of becoming successful or fulfilled. So what happens if we shift that goal - to finding alternative ways of living? To seeing one another for the unique contributions we each bring from that perspective?

Of course, it is not always simple. Sometimes it is not the relationship that drains you - but something in you that is being awakened. An old fear. A familiar pattern. Then the question becomes: is it the relationship that does not work, or an inner system that wants to be seen? Either way - nurture the connections that carry life, even when they require patience, presence, and listening.

And perhaps it is the everyday relationships that hold the longest. The ones with a child. An elder. A neighbour. An animal. The cashier. The tree you pass each day. What happens there grounds you. Reminds you that you are not only a thought or a longing - you are also a body in a place, a face in a shared world.

Resilience is not built in large networks of like-minded people. It is built in small, recurring meetings with difference. In recognition despite divergence. In knowing that someone sees you - and in seeing someone back. In being part of something that works not despite our differences - but because of them.

Relationship with place and the more-than-human

Relationship is not only something that happens between people. It also lives in our connection to the place we inhabit - the ground we walk on, the wind, the weather, the turning of the seasons. The food we eat. The birds that pass by. The things that surround us. But we have forgotten how to live in contact with the more-than-human world. Perhaps it happened when we began to call nature “resources”. Perhaps when we moved into climate-controlled rooms. Perhaps when food lost its place and gained a price instead. We stopped listening. We began to live on top of the earth, instead of with it.

To live in relationship is to live with. To see the landscape as a participant, not a backdrop. To feel that the place also feels you. To care for the things around you. To tend gently. To see the years and the stories carried in every object.

And perhaps it is here - in our relationship with the more-than-human - that we can learn something essential about reciprocity. The tree does not take more than it needs. The bird does not demand that you be a certain way. The ground gives and takes in rhythms that cannot be measured by performance - the rush of summer, the rest of winter, the leap of spring, the return of autumn. There is a kind of honesty in these relationships. A clarity. They teach us to rest without guilt, to give without counting, to receive without shame. They remind us that rhythm is not inefficiency - it is life’s own design.

And maybe they remind us of something we have forgotten - that we were never separate. That the boundary between me and the world has always been porous. That we do not stand outside the whole - we carry it within us. We are part of something that breathes through us.

What happens between words

Much of what matters in a relationship happens between words. The silence. The pause. The glance that turns away - or stays. It is the grammar of relationship, the part that truly speaks. We have learned to talk fast, efficiently, convincingly - yet we are slowly losing the ability to speak truthfully. To say what is difficult. To stay with what feels uncomfortable. To be present without having a ready answer.

To be in relationship requires that we reclaim another kind of language - one that does not just inform, but connects.

Perhaps it begins with how we speak to ourselves. How we meet our own vulnerability, tiredness, longing. If you cannot listen to your own body - how will you hear someone else’s? If you cannot hold your own complexity - how will you hold the complexity of a relationship?

Your relationship with yourself sets the depth of all other relationships - like a base note that decides the frequency on which you can meet others. To stop trying to be everything, and instead become something well. In this time of polarization, when relationships harden, it becomes an act of quiet resistance to stay in conversation where you do not agree. To choose presence when everything around you calls for speed. To listen to understand, not to convince.

A future of reciprocity

We stand at a threshold. Old relationships are falling apart. Conversations are thinning. The world no longer feels familiar. Many of us are searching for new circles, yet mostly find other seekers - not whole groups. But perhaps this in-between space is an opening.

If we stop trying to be complete on our own. If we stop searching for those who are exactly like us. If we dare to build groups of complementary beings instead of like-minded ones - something new can emerge. Then the pathfinder no longer needs to carry everything alone, but can lean on the guardian who sees what they miss. The creator can dream big because the builder makes it real. The reformer can challenge because the weaver holds it all together. We can stop measuring one another by performance and instead ask: What awakens in me when I am with you? What becomes possible together that was never possible alone?

The old society was built on contracts - written, regulated, legal. But a living society is built on relationships that adjust through presence, not control. Where structure is created through trust - not the other way around.

Perhaps this is where transition truly begins. Not in ideas or strategies - but in our willingness to stay in contact, even when it hurts. In groups that dare to be incomplete together, and through that, become whole. In relationships where we are not filled by each other but shaped through each other. In choosing not to flee what rubs and irritates, but to let it show us the systems we carry.

And perhaps, before anything else, it begins in understanding that we were never meant to make it on our own. That the longing for belonging is not weakness, but wisdom. That to become whole does not mean to become complete - it means to find your place among others.

Relationship is not just a tool for understanding the world. It is the world. And we come into being through it - if only we dare.

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About this essay
We’re facing challenges that cannot be solved with the same logic that created them. In exploring our vast “knowing–doing gap,” I’m developing a tool to help us see our inner and outer systems – and the friction between them. Like a compass, it offers a set of lenses or directions that can be explored individually or together.

Relation is the third of these lenses. Here you can find the first two - Rythm and Position.

You can subscribe to follow this work, or explore it through your own life and context by joining 100 Days.

For more writing from the edge where an old world fades and a flickering new one begins – visit WEAVE.

Everything is moving. And not in ways we’re used to. Climate, technology, war, nature, relationships, power, work – the world is reshaping itself, and we’re trying to do the same. Yet we cling to what we know. Perhaps more tightly than we care to admit.

Places where we’ve been seen. Positions and roles we’ve fought hard for. That still reward us, even as we begin to doubt their true worth. Relationships that helped make us who we are.

Even though the world speaks of transformation, most of the curves still point in the wrong direction – the planet is getting warmer, species are disappearing, and people’s mental health is declining. So what are we missing? When we talk about transition, could it be that we all want to do it from roughly the same place we already stand? We say, “I want to make a difference.” But perhaps what we really mean is, “I want to make a difference – without losing what I’ve built.” Without too much compromise, without too much sacrifice.

And maybe that’s where the transition gets stuck. Not in knowledge or intention, but in our inability to let go. In self-examination.

We were shaped by a logic that taught us to take space. To make what we do grow. Expand. Become more. Have more. Be more. Become someone. Research shows that the more you have, the more entitled you feel to keep it. The system trained us to hold positions, to defend them, to compete. Not to yield.

But your position isn’t just what you do. It’s where you stand – in relation to others. It shapes how you speak, how you move, what you allow to emerge. How the world moves around you. That’s where change has to begin.
We need to start doing the hardest thing of all – to shift our own positions.

So what happens if you start to move? To turn. To explore. Is there a more natural place to stand?
If you’ve always been the one pushing – what happens if you pause?
If you’ve always held back your thoughts – what happens if you start to speak?
If you’ve always taken space – what happens if you step aside?

Who might you become if you stopped doing what you do? What did you abandon long ago – perhaps without even noticing? What position did you take because it was possible, not because it was true?

Where do you make the most difference?

Inside, it turns and grinds. Where do I actually make the most difference? Not where you’re most visible. Not where you hold the title you worked hard for. Not where you feel most comfortable or secure.

To truly transform, you have to be willing to compromise with everything you already know. To stay open to the possibility that the place where you’re needed most might be entirely unexpected. That your contribution may be required in spaces you can’t yet imagine. That you might need to say goodbye to the things you’ve built your identity around.

Because wherever you stand – as employee or unemployable, citizen, consultant or freelancer, artist, entrepreneur, parent, leader, politician, or financier – there are scripts already written. Expectations.

As an employee: stay within your job description, don’t risk too much. As an entrepreneur: deliver what the investor wants, build according to their logic, not your own. As a leader: be clear, strong, have the answers. Everywhere, we’re expected to repeat old patterns.

But these roles hold us captive. We learned to put them on, leaving parts of ourselves at the door – longing, doubt, the body – to fit into a form that suited the system. We became so skilled at it that we stopped noticing we were doing it.

When a position no longer serves

Some have already begun to move. A little or a lot. Only to discover that the world around them hasn’t yet caught up. You think you’ve found a new position, but since few others are there, you can neither act in new ways nor return to the old ones. You have to shift others’ positions while moving your own.
An open way of working doesn’t function if the surrounding relationships still depend on control. Regenerative business doesn’t work if what’s meant to regenerate isn’t allowed to set the pace.

So you have to do several things at once: turn roles upside down, become the new market, play your way into positions that others can later step into. I picture enough of us existing to begin living the new paradigm – yet we fumble for one another inside a system not built for us to see or hear each other. And unless we step out of it, fully or even temporarily, we can’t see our new positions.

There’s also responsibility in leaving positions that no longer serve. In not clinging to what was once right but no longer is. It takes courage. Time. Awareness. To see that even well-intentioned roles can stand in the way of what’s trying to emerge.

The system’s imprint

But it’s not just you. And it’s not new. The roles we live in were shaped by old systems – by Descartes and a long line of thought that separated mind from body, reason from emotion. By industrialism, which turned people into cogs in a machine. By power structures that decided who got to speak and who was expected to listen.

When industrialism arrived, every person suddenly had to fit into a box. The job description became the map. The hierarchy became the truth. Position became something you had, not something you took. Profession became identity. Job titles, organizational charts, ideals.

We all carry this legacy – but we carry it differently. Some were born into rooms where their voices were already heard. Others have had to fight for every place at the table. Some learned that their bodies automatically granted credibility. Others learned to constantly prove their right to be there. Systemic patterns, shaped by class, gender, race, geography.

Position is not only about function – it’s also about conditions. What do you have that you never really had to fight for? What network? What education? What automatic credibility? How could you use it differently – not to lose, but to liberate?

Privilege doesn’t have to carry guilt – but it carries responsibility.

From ego to function

Something is breaking open. More and more people feel it: this no longer fits. Titles feel hollow, careers feel meaningless. The question arises: Am I really making a difference?

The shift happens there – from ego to function. From building status to responding to what’s needed. Not who you want to become, but what the moment requires.

The old system was built on being someone. Having status. Climbing. Being seen.
The new one asks for something else: that we contribute. That we find the place where our presence actually changes something. Where we’re needed.

The old model was hierarchical – top-down, with fixed roles. The new is situational, ecological, relational. Like a web – where positions shift with rhythm, need, and context.

A living position isn’t something you are – it’s something you inhabit. And it changes. With the moment, with time, with what’s needed. You can be a leader in one situation, a supporter in another, a listener in a third.

So how do we take that step? Perhaps by listening differently. To what’s needed, not what we want. By letting movement arise from within. By accepting that you may be needed somewhere other than where you’ve grown used to being.

But to understand how to return to that, we must first understand where our current roles come from – the forces that shaped them – and how we can begin to shift them.

Why it’s so hard to step out

It’s not easy to change role or position. It’s frightening. Because who are you then?
And the system around you – it’s grown used to you playing your part. When you change, everything moves.

We carry a constant noise in our heads – the expectations we’ve internalized. Our parents’ voices, society’s norms, colleagues’ gazes. They’ve become so ingrained that we mistake them for our own thoughts.

And then there’s the practical side: the money, the reputation, the dreams you’ve built on the position you hold. The history, the investments you’ve made – of time, effort, or money. The fear of loss. Your place in the network. It’s not only your identity you risk losing – it’s your safety, your belonging, your future.

So perhaps it starts there. Not by throwing everything overboard, but by shifting slightly. Testing, returning. Feeling your way forward.

Your position isn’t static. It changes – with life, with time, with what’s needed. That, too, is a form of responsibility: to step forward, or to step aside. To not cling to a role simply because it once fit. To know when you’re no longer needed – that’s a kind of responsibility, too.

Another future

What if we could simply lay all our roles on the table? See them. Turn them over. Set them free. Leave some behind and start again. Or maybe both – one foot in one position, the other in another.

What might happen then?

It won’t be without pain. Or loss. Or resistance. The real question may not be what you want to change, but what you’re willing to lose so that something else can grow.

When we let go of roles that no longer serve, we release energy. When we build organizations that prioritize life over control, we create systems that can breathe. When we listen to our true positions, we can build futures that endure.

A reality where more of us ask, Where do I actually make a difference? instead of How do I become successful? Where we build organizations that allow people to move where they’re needed. Where power becomes something that flows – not something to hold onto. Where position isn’t a role you take, but a relationship you enter.

Then we can begin to build something that lasts. For real.

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About this essay
We’re facing challenges that cannot be solved with the same logic that created them. In exploring our vast “knowing–doing gap,” I’m developing a tool to help us see our inner and outer systems – and the friction between them. Like a compass, it offers a set of lenses or directions that can be explored individually or together.

Position is the second of these lenses.

You can subscribe to follow this work, or explore it through your own life and context by joining 100 Days.

Gateways for listening

Embodied positions

• How you stand in a room – open, closed, leaning forward, withdrawn

• Whose voice rises and whose softens

• Where you sit in meetings – at the center, on the side, at the head

• How your presence changes the room – do people notice when you enter?

• Your position in the conversation – the one who listens, the one who speaks, the one who sums up

Inherited positions

• Your class background – the rooms you were shaped for

• Your gender – the expectations that come with it

• Your skin color – which doors open, which stay closed

• Your education – the language you have access to

• Your age – who listens to you, and who doesn’t

• Your networks – who you can call when something needs to happen

Professional positions

• Your formal role – what the contract says

• What you chase, and what seeks you out

• Your actual function – what you really do

• Your informal power – who asks you first

• Your place in the hierarchy – who you report to, who reports to you

• Whose work is visible, and whose remains unseen

Relational positions

• Who gets to speak first – and who gets the last word

• Who asks the questions – and who’s expected to answer

• Whose silence is noticed – and whose presence is taken for granted

• Your position in the family – eldest, youngest, the one who holds it together

• Your position in friendship – the initiator, the responder

Systemic positions we’re held in

• Gender roles – who’s expected to lead, who’s expected to support

• Work roles – manager, employee, consultant, intern

• Economic positions – to own, to rent, to share, to lack, to hold power

• Geographic positions – city, countryside, center, periphery

• Political positions – voice, representation, marginalization

• Knowledge positions – expert, beginner, autodidact, academic

And the positions we can choose

• To step forward when something needs to be said

• To step aside when something or someone else is needed

• To hold space for others’ processes

• To connect what needs to be linked

• To translate between different worlds

• To initiate without taking over

• To listen until you know where you’re needed

For more writing from the edge where an old world fades and a flickering new one begins – visit WEAVE or subscribe.

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Our economy doesn’t rest on money alone. It rests on the ability to make someone say yes. We call it “showing opportunities”, “inspiring decisions”, “helping”, “simplifying”, “partnerships”—but most of the time, it’s something else entirely. Something we’ve become so accustomed to that we barely see it: indoctrination, social pressure, seduction, persuasion—sometimes even coercion.

It teaches us to push, to ignore, to play the game. It permeates every part of our lives.
Sales is the invisible backbone of our economy—and of our culture. And it’s time to expose it.

That’s where my own career began: charts, rankings, pressure, bonuses, flattery. Intensely stimulating environments—engaging, positive, almost impossible to resist. It was easy to feel capable, clear when you failed.

But what do we really learn when we work in sales?

What we say we do

Every sales training I’ve ever encountered describes it as:

• Persuading

• Building relationships

• Creating value

• Helping customers find solutions

• Listening to needs

• Being an advisor

It sounds safe and honest. Almost caring. A kind of sales pitch for sales itself. But in truth, it’s one of the great performances of the extractive economy—a logic that says: “Take as much as you can, as fast as you can, walk away quickly, and call it success.”

What we actually learn

Beneath the surface lies something else—a set of techniques we learn to master to loud applause. You might recognize them, but think about what it does to us when this becomes our default way of interacting:

Manipulation in disguise

Manipulation in sales comes smiling. It makes eye contact. It uses your name warmly and praises your “great question” when you hesitate. The voice is calm, the body language open. It looks like presence but is in fact rehearsed. Behind every open smile lies a plan, a direction, a goal. What feels like a conversation is often a guided path toward yes.

The persuasion hides in the language—information filtered through chosen words, risks omitted, futures painted in bright colors.
And when the deal is done? The warmth fades. The voice disappears.

Dependence instead of relationship

“Relationship-building techniques,” they’re called. Mirroring body language, repeating first names, asking open-ended questions—all meant to make us feel seen and heard. But often, what’s being built isn’t a relationship—it’s dependence. An emotional bond where trust becomes a tool rather than a goal.

We’re taught to find pain points we can later exploit. The safer the customer feels, the easier it is to say yes. And in that very moment—when their guard is down—the offer lands.

Hiding complexity

We claim to create value, yet often only show the surface. Products and services are presented through emotion—promises of a better future, improvement, belonging. Complexity is simplified into something easy to buy. Consequences and trade-offs stay off-screen.

We help people imagine a future—without inviting them to consider the cost. The simpler something looks, the easier it is to sell.

Help as strategy

Even help becomes a tactic. A “no” is rarely an end—it’s the beginning of processing. We identify insecurities to play on. Fear becomes fuel: fear of missing out, of making the wrong choice, of being left behind. Help becomes conditional—and always leads toward yes.

Listening as control

Listening is said to be crucial in sales—and it is, but rarely for the sake of genuine connection. It’s listening as surveillance. Listening to locate weaknesses, to interpret hesitation as opportunity. Every doubt is a signal to push harder. We ask leading questions, not to understand—but to steer.

Power: what drives

Reward. Fear. Competition. Adrenaline. Incentive systems create direction. Commissions, quotas, targets—all designed to make us push, no matter if it’s right for the person in front of us. The energy of sales is often struggle, not collaboration.

Sales, as we know it, is the purest expression of what’s broken in our economic system. It shapes us deeply. Even when we think we see through the manipulation, we still let it guide us.

Think about how it feels to be sold to—the moment you sense that the person across from you is following an inner script. The warmth feels calculated. The connection fades. Every question you’re asked seems to measure your potential as a transaction. You’re no longer a you—you’ve become an it.

It does something to the body, doesn’t it? A mix of mistrust and fatigue. Shame that you almost believed the other person cared. Resistance, a tightening in the chest. Exhaustion from having to navigate this, over and over again.

Sales logic has seeped into everything: how we present ourselves, pitch ideas, even how we teach children to “sell themselves.” It cuts relationships off from depth, from rhythm, from complexity. It optimizes. It simplifies.

When sales becomes worldview

Sales has become the stage where our value system rehearses itself daily.
Where we train in hierarchy: between the one who has and the one who wants. Between the one who knows and the one who must be convinced. Between the one who leads the conversation and the one who follows.

This logic now defines our social reality. It has become the default mode of interaction—far beyond business.

Politicians “pitch” their ideas. They’re trained to stay on message, no matter the question. To never admit doubt or error, because honesty would look like weakness. Media training has normalized a new level of dishonesty. It’s become acceptable to say things because they sound good, not because they’re true. To avoid questions. To spin. To stay in the message even when reality contradicts it.

We no longer expect truth. We expect spin.

On social media, we present our lives as products. Every post is a chance to “build your brand.” On LinkedIn, everyone is “passionate,” “driven,” “seeking new challenges.” Authenticity has become another performance. On Instagram, life is curated. Even dating has turned into a sales funnel—optimized to convert swipes into matches.

Every sentence must lead someone further down a funnel. Every story needs a hook. Every idea must fit an elevator pitch. We’ve lost patience for the complex, for what takes time to explain or understand. Everything must be fast, light, sellable.

In a system built on growth, moral blind spots barely register. But if we start from purpose instead—if we ask what we actually want to create—then sales must transform completely. We would ask: Should we even sell this? What real needs are we serving? Are we making the world better—or worse?

On value – seeing beyond money

One of the deepest distortions sales has produced is the belief that everything can be measured in money. We’re trained to listen for buying signals, not meaning. In the pursuit of measurable success, we rationalize away what truly matters.

But if we want a new economy to work, we must start counting differently. There are so many other kinds of transactions and currencies we already live by:

We give and receive all the time—time, attention, knowledge, care, energy, trust.

What if we started speaking about our exchanges like this:

• “I have a surplus of this” (something I might even share at a very little cost to myself)

• “Right now I have a deficit of that” (something I could use more of)

It changes the dynamic. Suddenly it’s not about convincing someone to give you money—but about recognizing other forms of flow. Balance instead of growth. Resonance instead of conversion.

Imagine entrepreneurship that begins not with “How do I get them to buy?” but with “What is needed here?”

Where the goal isn’t to close deals—but to open flows. Where transparency is the foundation—showing what things cost, and why. Where honesty about trade-offs replaces the illusion of perfection. Where you can say: “This product is good at this, but not at that.” Where a “no” is simply a recognition that something doesn’t fit—here, now.

Real relationships can’t be mapped, managed, or optimized. They grow unevenly. They rest. They shift shape. People give and receive, over time, in different ways.

True connection requires that we actually care. That people feel seen—not as market segments, but as individuals. That they want to contribute, not for return, but because they want the relationship itself to continue existing.

Reclaiming connection

We are marked by the old system—shaped by a world where positioning, packaging, and performance were the way forward. A game we learned to play to survive.

Now, as we try to build something new, we often stand without language. Without tools. We want to collaborate, but don’t quite know how. We want to give, but fear being taken advantage of. We want to contribute, but hesitate—how do you show value without selling yourself?

It hurts when the balance breaks—when someone gives too much without receiving, or withholds until the value is proven, measurable, secured.

This is where we are now: in between. The old no longer works, the new not yet formed.
So we need to talk about it. Practice it. Move differently, even when it feels uncertain.

At its core, sales is about connection—but somewhere along the way, we lost it.
We took something deeply human—the impulse to exchange, to share, to help—and turned it into something optimized, mechanical, strategic.

It’s time to take it back.

Hi, I’m Anna.
I have a surplus of knowledge in new economies, possibilities for change, networks, courage, experience, pattern recognition, presence and honesty.

I’m short on time—but also on brave clients, long-term trust, and people who can stay with the uncomfortable questions.

What do you have a surplus of? What’s running low?

Maybe there’s something here that wants to circulate.

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100 Days is where I explore the knowing–doing gap — with practice, together, through the messy middle.

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I grew up in an age of optimism. The world lay open before me, waiting. If I just worked hard enough, anything was possible. If it didn’t work, it was my fault—I simply had to push a little harder and postpone everything else.

So I sought out the places where things moved fast—where the future was being made, where decisions were taken. I thrived there, made a career. It was good to be forward, to take space, to perform. More, faster, better. Last one at the office wins. Sales graphs, pay by performance, praise as currency. More expensive clothes, longer trips, bmore promises of what was yet to come.

Then came exhaustion. Fewer dreams. Time slipping away. Stress. Eventually, I couldn’t hold a long thought in my head. My body protested, and I didn’t understand why. There wasn’t really a language for it. So I kept going. Rest was for the weak. My worth lay in what I produced.

But as the years passed, something started to ache . The injustices. The ruthlessness. The growing sense that maybe not everything was, in fact, possible. What was the true cost of giving everything I had to systems that built futures I no longer believed in? Job after job. Change project after change project—enthusiastic beginnings with sorrowful endings. One after another, yet nothing really changed. Slowly, perhaps too slowly, it dawned on me: systems exist to sustain themselves. They have no real interest in changing deeply. And if I am part of them—what, then, is it that I uphold?

That was where I began to peel things away. Slowly. Layer by layer.

The Surface

First, the visible layer—my small human actions. Who gets my voice, what I buy, how I move through the world. The realization that everything is connected: every purchase a web of extraction, transport, wages, impact, and stories about what we call beautiful. I began to re-evaluate—plastic, clothes, food. Everything I had taken for granted, everything that had been convenient, now carried another weight. Someone else had paid the price. Recycling, conscious choices, organic. But it wasn’t enough. What I upheld ran deeper.

Next came another realization: if everything I buy is part of intricate value chains and systems—then who, and what, pays for my salary? What value do I actually create, and for whom? What am I contributing to? Somewhere along the chain of what I uphold, someone else is losing something—nature, people further back, future generations.

My job, my existence, my position, the story I tell about who I am—all the places I thought I was creating value, maybe I was just holding up what already existed. Every new strategy, every meeting, every “innovation”—small tweaks in a system that didn’t work. Had I simply spent my time, creativity, and life force polishing the old so it could shine a little longer? And by doing that—by not speaking up more clearly—had I become the very act of upholding itself?

What I See and How I Speak

Then came language. I began to hear the words around me and how they shaped reality. Efficiency. Delivery. Sustainability. Scalability. Impact. The words weren’t innocent. They carried the logic of the system within them—speed, control, progress, profit. When I said “a good day,” I meant a day when I had produced something measurable, ticked off lists, proven my worth.

Even in private life, the same logic crept in. Friendships were “good connections,” love was “my current partner,” rest was “recovery”—as if we were always on our way somewhere, always measuring, evaluating, performing. I began to understand that language doesn’t just describe the world—it creates it. It defines what I can say, think, feel. I tried to speak differently, but it felt unfamiliar. Those who once listened didn’t listen as intently anymore—but new ones came, who understood.

My gaze shifted. I lost interest in the shiny, the fast, the visible. Even that was a form of upholding—how I had rewarded certain voices with my attention while ignoring others. How I had upheld hierarchies simply by habit. Giving air to the wrong questions, feeding the wrong places with my attention and likes.

Rhythm

When my gaze changed, my body followed—tired, but faithful. I began to notice how my calendar had always been at odds with me, how it had never truly fit. The cycles within me—hormonal, emotional, earthly—had never belonged in a straight line from Monday to Friday. For years I had optimized sleep, breathing, recovery, but all I really did was rationalize my exhaustion. And not just mine—our entire society is built on a rhythm that doesn’t match any living body. We live in clock time, but the body lives in its own. And when the clock wins for too long, the body starts whispering in new languages—pain, fog, apathy. I realized my fatigue wasn’t private. It was planetary.

The same pattern showed up in relationships. So I began, slowly, to trade usefulness for presence, function for closeness. I started to see how others measured, weighed, and evaluated connections based on what they could lead to. The logic repeated itself—speed before depth, efficiency before rhythm. Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.

Beneath it all was a sorrow I had never let myself feel—the grief over everything I missed while I was running. The relationships that could have been, the moments I rushed past that will never return. We talk about transition, but rarely about this kind of loss. Without grief, there can be no change—and no new direction.

Thought Patterns and the Nervous System – From the Inside Out

Deeper still came the structures in my mind. One of the deepest layers: the belief that I must handle everything on my own. I grew up in a culture that taught me asking for help was weakness, that success was mine alone, and that my worth depended on performance. But I am not a separate individual—I am a social creature, built for cooperation and reciprocity. Evolution made us to carry each other. And yet I lived as if it all depended on me, and when I couldn’t manage, I felt shame instead of realizing I was in the wrong kind of system.

That same culture taught me to value the young, the fast, the polished. To prize strength over sensitivity, analysis over intuition, conquest over care. Even when we claim to work for deep transformation, we keep reproducing the same logic—the belief that the world exists to give us something. How often do I approach people, ideas, places with the question: “What can I get from this?” “What can I learn?” As if the world were a stage for my own development.

And finally—the brain itself. The synapses, reflexes, reactions. Every time I’ve done things this way, they’ve left traces: tiny electric rewards every time I accomplish something; dopamine blinking like a notification; shame rising when I stop. I became a self-driving system. No boss needed—I carry the oversight within me. Achievement is safety. Control is love. Tempo is worth. This is no longer ideology; it’s biology. I’m programmed for obedience, trained to chase the next task as if life depended on it.

But as I saw this, something began to crack. The synapses hesitated, as if longing for other signals—as if the body remembered something the brain had forgotten: slowness, rhythm, connection. Maybe unlearning isn’t an intellectual act at all but a physical process. Maybe I have to reprogram myself with silence, rest, touch.

Here I reach something almost unfathomably deep—the highways of my brain, shaped by a lifetime. I keep seeking new information, even though everything has already been said. Knowledge isn’t the issue—it’s how I live it. I follow the system’s rhythms even when I think I’ve broken free, as if there were still some final destination where everything will fall into place.

I talk about power when I’m hurt by it, but rarely about the power I exercise. I displace responsibility sometimes. I see the Earth as something I affect, instead of something I am.

When everything is stripped away, only the body remembers. Thought patterns fire like reflexes; the reward system jolts at every ping, every sign of approval. I’ve carried the system within me all along, sustaining it even when I tried to quit. Silence itself can be complicity: I say nothing, protect the image of myself. Every time I choose comfort over justice, I reinforce what hurts.

And yet—it feels like something begins here. When I see without turning away. When I let sorrow in, let the body rest, let the rhythm slow. When I forgive myself for being part of what I’m now trying to leave behind. Reconciliation is a movement. A breath. A beginning.

And somewhere at the very bottom, I sometimes glimpse something new. Where the threads are interwoven, there is no longer a “me.” In certain encounters, I realize my nervous system isn’t mine—it’s part of something larger. We infect one another with new tempos; we are woven into a collective tension, a civilization in constant alert. But we see each other.

Maybe my recovery isn’t individual—maybe the whole web needs to rest. Maybe we have to recalibrate our rhythm together, like a collective heart slowing down so the planet can catch its breath.

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Who I Want to Become

I don’t fool myself. I still move up and down between the layers, make the wrong choices, get pulled back into the pace. But at least now, I see it. I forgive myself. I learn.

I want to become someone who no longer pretends to be free, but truly strives to be. Someone who speaks from the heart and listens to a voice larger than her own—ancestral, full of lived experience. Someone who says what she means without worrying how it will land. Who opens doors for others, quiets her ego, lifts the whole. Who takes things apart and puts them back together differently. Who stays, connects, rests when needed. Who can hold pain, keep the door between life and death open, and understand more about life’s great crossings.

My desire began to shift—from wanting to succeed to wanting to live in harmony. From seeking meaning to feeling it. I now try to build relationships that are not only between people, but also with place, trees, birds, wind. That’s where rhythm is relearned. I try to measure success in fullness, connection, presence—not in speed or visibility. I’m learning that resources—energy, attention, money—are also flows. They can nourish life or deplete it. And perhaps my real task now is to listen—to what needs to be released, what wants to grow. To value old knowledge, because the new has nothing more to teach me.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be free from all of this. But I can choose not to feed it every day.

Many of the ideas in this text grew out of the work I’ve done within 100 Days, a living practice exploring inner and outer systems — to find language, rhythm, and portals for change.

Read more and join 100 Days here

In the beginning, there was rhythm.

Before words, before structure, before measurement. The sea beat against the shore, sap flowed from trees, plants exhaled oxygen, animals followed light and warmth. No creature was separate from the whole – every life was a beat in the same composition. It lived in the body. We were in rhythm.

Then something happened.

We took the rhythm out of the earth and placed it into tools. Turned the drum into a metronome, the day into a clock. We began to speak of time instead of rhythm, of production instead of pulse. And the world, which once breathed with us, drew a deep breath – and has been holding it ever since.

But the rhythm is still there. You can hear it when you fall asleep, when you walk barefoot, when you watch an animal or a fading flower. When you hum something without knowing where it came from. An echo of something we forgot.

I know exactly what it feels like to live without rhythm. All my life I’ve negotiated with fatigue and hunger. Grit my teeth through pains whispering that something was wrong. A slave to rhythms that were never mine, calling it responsibility, performance, professionalism – while the world cheered me on. I know I’m not alone. We became so used to not listening that we didn’t even notice we’d stopped hearing.

Life accelerates

When the train arrived, it wasn’t just a new way to travel but a new way to experience reality. For the first time, we could move faster than our own senses. The body, shaped over millennia to the pace of walking, was thrown into a rhythm it wasn’t built for – where the speed was too great for the eye to grasp the blurred world outside.

The reaction of the time was a mix of ecstasy and fear. People wept as the trains set off; others fainted in terror. Early passengers spoke of dizziness, shortness of breath, and pounding hearts – symptoms soon named “railway spine.” Doctors described it as a mix of anxiety and mechanical overstimulation: the nervous system simply couldn’t keep up.

Mechanical speed broke the link between movement and experience. You could no longer count seconds by the rhythm of your steps or follow the sun across the horizon. Humans became passengers, not participants. The traveler, enclosed in a compartment, turned into “a human parcel” – a body transported without involvement.

Speed soon became an ideology. To hurry was to be modern. To slow down was to fall behind.

When the clock came to the village

Somewhere here, we changed at the core. But perhaps it didn’t begin with the machine itself, but with the clock. Maybe the first revolution wasn’t industrial but rhythmic. Because the moment we began to measure time, we began to measure ourselves.

Before the clock, time was something you lived in. The farmer’s time was bound to the earth and the light. He rose when the sun did, ate when hunger called, rested when his body demanded it. Work followed the seasons, not the schedule. There was no such thing as “wasting time” – because time wasn’t a resource, it was a web that everything else was woven into.

When the clock arrived in the village, something shifted – quietly, slowly, but profoundly. At first, it hung in the church tower. Then in the manor house, the office, the shop. Then it ticked loudly on the kitchen wall, and finally, on our wrists. Suddenly, time wasn’t just something that passed – it became something that could be lost.

A new kind of morality took root: the punctual as virtuous, the slow as careless. Time was no longer God’s, but the individual’s responsibility. And responsibility turned into guilt. For the first time, people said, “Hurry up.” For the first time, one could be late.

The clock created efficiency, but it also gave us haste. And with haste came the shame of not keeping up, of not being enough.

Time becomes money

When Benjamin Franklin wrote that “time is money,” he laid the foundation for an idea that would shape all of modernity. We gained a new moral worldview where time was no longer life, but capital.

For time to become money, it first had to be separated from the body. From the earth. From rhythm. In the agrarian world, time was something shared – with the seasons, the animals, the weather, with one another. A rainfall could change an entire week’s work. No one owned time; it moved through all living things.

When the clock arrived, time could suddenly be divided. Work time. Free time. Overtime. The very word “free time” revealed the shift – time was now something you had to free yourself from, not something you lived in. Time became a contract between employer and employee, no longer an all-encompassing reality.

In the factories, clocks hung as symbols of obedience. Every minute of lateness was deducted from one’s pay. The whistle didn’t sound for rhythm, but for control. People began to measure themselves in the same units: How efficient am I? How much did I accomplish today?

It was no longer the body that set the limits – it was the economy.

Industrialization changed humanity’s experience of time at its core. Time was no longer something to live within, but something to use. As the economy broke free from the landscape, time broke free from rhythm. And so, the crisis deepened.

It runs deep. Even though I’m privileged enough to mostly set my own schedule, I still measure my days in output. Fatigue is something to be fought. The body is a project to be managed – not a voice to be deeply listened to.

Rhythm as resistance

Throughout history, cultures have created recurring pauses – holy days, days of rest, rites of passage. Whatever their names, they shared the same function: to help us reconnect with life itself, with one another, with something greater than work. Perhaps these were humanity’s first acts of rhythmic resistance – collective reminders that the world cannot be kept running without pause.

In systems built on constant motion, all this becomes a provocation. In today’s economic logic, rest is no longer a right – it has become suspect. Those who rest too much are questioned. Those who fall ill must prove their worth. Rest is expected to be functional, fast, and productive; the message is clear: recover so you can perform again.

We keep moving the boundaries. Scrolling instead of resting. Answering work emails from bed. Filling every silence with activity. Apps, notifications, reminders – everything optimized for motion, not recovery. To reject efficiency is to resist. To rest without purpose is to disrupt the machine.

Rest is dangerous to systems built on constant motion – because in stillness, the body starts to feel what it truly desires.

Throughout history, people have used rhythm to reclaim power. Not only through strikes or uprisings, but in the everyday – in small, embodied acts of protest: resting when expected to perform, walking slowly when everything rushes, listening to the body when the schedule is too tight.

And collectively: in sit-ins, hunger strikes, silent actions – where the absence of movement itself becomes a disturbance. In songs. In drumming.

When 19th-century workers in England shut down their machines to demand shorter workdays, it was an uprising against tempo itself. And when we speak today of regenerative movements or “slow” culture, it is a continuation of that same struggle: to reclaim rhythm from the market, and let the earth and our bodies set the pace once again.

The rhythm of the ecosystem

One of the most frustrating things about advocating for a new economic logic is the assumption that it’s about going backward, when in fact it’s about remembering and restoring how life actually works. Bodies, ecosystems, and cultures don’t need to be managed the way they are today; they need to be coordinated. And that happens through rhythm.

For centuries, we’ve sought balance through control. We’ve tried to tame every kind of variation, standardizing processes in every domain – work, education, healthcare. We’ve tried to keep the same pace regardless of need, season, or feeling.

But life isn’t even. It pulses. Regenerative thinking –whether in agriculture, organizations, or leadership – is not, at its core, about technique or methodology. It’s about understanding rhythm as systemic intelligence. Seeing that balance doesn’t arise from stability, but from flow.

Ecosystems breathe. A tree sheds its leaves in autumn to prepare for rest and renewal. A river floods its banks as part of how nutrients spread and the land regenerates. A wetland may seem still, but beneath the surface an intense cyclical process of decay and renewal unfolds. Intelligence.

When we force nature to produce without rhythm – through fertilizers that break soil cycles, monocultures that never rest, forests that never age, or production systems that must endlessly generate more in less time – we not only deepen the ecological crisis. We also destroy the knowledge ecosystems hold: how to live sustainably over time.

Regenerative agriculture is a practical example of what it means to reintroduce rhythm. Instead of forcing the soil to yield maximum output every season, it works with periods of growth and rest. Nutrients are returned, animals graze in rotation so the land can recover. The work follows the logic of the seasons instead of trying to override it.

The result? The soil grows richer, not poorer. Harvests become more resilient over time. The system heals itself.

The rhythm of organizations

Organizations are made up of people but are often managed as if they were machines. We plan in quarters, optimize for constant output, and encourage continuous productivity, as if energy were linear, stable, and detached from the rhythms of life. But humans don’t work that way. We move in cycles. We need both pressure and pause, creation and stillness, in different proportions, in different moments.

Oh, the number of organizations I’ve met where what truly breathes has to sneak out in secret – in hallways, smoking areas, off-sites, hidden Slack channels. A quiet search for something more alive.

We are not simply awake or asleep; we move through deeper rhythms: periods of creativity followed by integration, times of social presence followed by solitude, seasons of expansion followed by recovery.

Modern work rarely honors this. The same hours, the same expectations, the same logic –regardless of a project’s phase, a person’s age, energy level, or the time of year. The more you work, the more valuable you are presumed to be. Yet what’s still measured is volume – not direction, not quality, not sustainability.

What if we instead designed work with rhythm as a foundation? Or at least allowed space for it in different ways?

Such an approach might include:

• Project cycles that breathe – with intense creative phases followed by time for reflection, integration, and the transfer of knowledge to other contexts.

• Organizations that shift tempo – where teams and individuals rotate between tasks with different energy levels, allowing growth instead of depletion.

• Decisions that mature – where important questions are given time to settle, both individually and collectively, rather than being forced to meet a deadline.

• Time off as real rest – not an excuse to recharge for more performance, but a necessary part of the system’s vitality.

The most resilient ecosystems are not those that produce constantly–they are those that know when to rest. Companies that seek endless growth think they’re building strength but are often building fragility. When crisis hits, they have no reserves, no buffer, no sensitivity left.

And where we stand now – facing global shifts, climate threats, exhausted societies - it’s no longer thinking alone that will save us. We have to start listening to our inherited, embodied, and collective intelligence.

A future with pulse

We already know what happens – to the planet and to ourselves – when rhythm disappears. Bodies burn out. Soils dry out. Ecosystems collapse. But we’re also beginning to understand what happens when rhythm returns.

The earth heals faster than we think – if we let it rest. We rediscover our sense of meaning when we stop forcing ourselves to perform endlessly. Organizations grow wiser when given time to digest their experiences. We grow through stillness, through the spaces in between, through what cannot be measured but carries all that we are.

I don’t know exactly how rhythm will return. But I’ve noticed that when I listen – truly listen – the world listens too. It responds. And every time, it feels like magic.

Maybe that’s where it all begins: in a body that dares to rest, and a system that dares to let it. And perhaps by seeing and speaking about rhythm, we can begin to see our inner and outer systems with new eyes—and slowly bring it back. To stand for its value. To not just push the world forward, but move with it. To remember that time doesn’t only move forward – it moves in circles. To realize that rest can be a way to repair the world.

When the clock came to the village, a long story of loss began. But it is also here, in the awareness of that loss, that a new rhythm can begin to pulse again.

About this essay
We’re facing challenges that cannot be solved with the same logic that created them. In exploring our vast “knowing–doing gap,” I’m developing a tool to help us see our inner and outer systems – and the friction between them. Like a compass, it offers a set of lenses or directions that can be explored individually or together.

Rhythm is the first of these lenses. It opens the way for the next thirteen – such as position (how we place ourselves in systems to be of most use), gaze (what we say goodbye to and what we choose to let in), or relation (who we became and who we might be in connection with others).

You can subscribe to follow this work, or explore it through your own life and context by joining 100 Days.

Want to start noticing rhythm in your own life? Begin here:

Rhythm is everywhere but our systems have taught us not to see it. Here are a few entry points to begin listening and, hopefully, to take some of them more seriously by bringing them back into daily life.

The body’s rhythms

• The heartbeat – a constant dialogue with the world (fear, rest, closeness, alertness)

• The breath – the rhythm that both carries and reveals emotions, thoughts, presence

• Sleep cycles and waves of fatigue – not always tied to night, but to processing, hormones, the nervous system

• Menstrual cycles – recurring periods of power, pain, and drive

• Hunger – not only what you eat, but when, how, and with what intention

• The rhythm of movement – how the body wants to stretch, move, rest

• The rhythm of aging – the body’s wisdom, new needs, new forms of care

The earth’s and place’s rhythms

• Seasons, bioregions, microclimates – the fog in September, the afternoon wind, what sun and warmth do to seeds

• Bird migrations, pollen seasons, blooming cycles – rhythms now shifting, yet still showing what is possible

• The moon’s cycles – shaping water, sleep, emotion

• The earth’s breath – CO₂ flows between day and night, winter and summer

• The silence of snowfall, the wind before a storm, colors fading at dusk – rhythms felt more than heard

• The rhythm of light – dawn, zenith, sunset – biological transitions that bring distinct energies

• The rhythm of soil – its rest between harvests

• The soundscape – crickets, traffic, silence, birdsong

Relational rhythms

• The ebb and flow of friendship – times of closeness, times of quiet

• Projects that need time to ripen – yet are forced into delivery before they’re ready

• Conversations that need pauses – space for thought, emotion, integration

• The rhythm of children – swings between intensity and rest, the need for predictability

• Places you return to again and again

• A group’s collective tempo – moments of harmony or dissonance

Ritual rhythms and possibilities

• Marking transitions – fires, celebrations, meals, endings

• The rhythm of grief – loss that returns, memories tied to seasons or dates

• Time off – moments when you consciously step outside the logic of work

• Sacred rhythms – sabbath, Ramadan, equinoxes, holidays – connections to something larger

• The body’s small, daily ceremonies – showers, walks, cleaning, watering plants, phone calls

• The creative ritual – making as a way to restore focus and meaning

And the systemic rhythms we are caught in

• Deadlines, quarterly goals, school years, annual budgets – rhythms that harden into structures

• The week – Monday as beginning, Friday as freedom

• Digital rhythms – notifications, updates, scrolling, algorithms

• Capital flows – when money moves, when “funding windows” open, when it’s “time to launch”

• Election years, political cycles and pendulums

• The market’s rhythm – hype cycles, trends, waves of speculation

• The 24/7 economy – when nothing is allowed to rest anymore

Photos by Martin Parr.

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It hits me during a morning walk. I’m saying goodbye. Not to life itself, but to the life I once knew. It’s slowly slipping away, and the farewell sits heavy in my chest, melancholic but with a strange kind of strength. The feeling is like when someone you love dies. A brutal presence, where priorities suddenly fall into place, together with a new kind of uncertainty and the finality of something that can’t be negotiated with.

When someone dies, everything stops for a while. You sit there, bewildered, staring out the window at a road where cars keep driving somewhere. How can they, when everything has stopped?

That’s what it feels like. Something in the world is slipping away from me. Slowly, like a memory fading from the body. I hear it in the wind that now has a different key, in the scents that come too early, in the birds breathing heavier in the heat. It’s as if the world I grew up in has started speaking a new language that I’m trying to understand the meaning of.

Apparently whales are singing in different frequencies now. The tones have changed, lower, softer. Maybe that’s what I’m doing too. My own voice is searching for another tone, one that no longer wants to drown out but to listen more.

What slips away

This is where I walk in the mornings. In a world where the edges of the shore still feel familiar, where I know their ebb and flow and how the seaweed rises after storms. Where I’ve learned the birds’ movements and watched the shades shift with the seasons. This is where mornings once carried a quiet sense of safety, not this ticking uncertainty.

When I hear how the sea is eating away the beaches at Haväng and the world begins to lose its contours, I feel myself letting go too, giving up the fight to hold on and defend what once was. I’ve shouted, written, tried to persuade. I’ve searched for the right tone, the right angle, the right numbers. But it no longer seems to matter.

Instead I’m saying goodbye to the idea that one day I’ll take my son across the world, back to my favorite beach, my favorite city, to that place with the baked garlic only I seemed to know about. The world is changing in ways that make returning difficult—not only geographically, but existentially. Conscience won’t allow it. It’s not the same place anymore, and I’m not the same person.

It hurts to think about it. The times the sun burned too hard, the paperbacks under the parasol, horizons that carried promise. Silent meals in mutual understanding, the energy that slowly returned. But reality breaks in. Birds begin to fall from the sky when the heat grows too strong. I saw a photo in a newspaper, a shoreline where dead birds lay as a dark line against the pale sand. It felt as if the world was slowly being switched off.

I’m saying goodbye to New York—the city I never grew tired of and that I may never see again. The wind that struck my face as I turned a corner in autumn, the smells, the smoke, the lights that never went out. I still see the images in my feed, from those who still live there, but it feels like another dimension now. It’s not sad anymore. Just distant. Like a life I may have left, or that may have left me.

I’m also quietly saying goodbye to the shapes here at home, the ones I might soon miss. To the still whisper of trees that still stand. Stillness. To the exact warmth of sunlit rock. To the red leaves that color autumns in a special way, a steady reference I don’t know if my grandchildren will ever see or share.

All of this used to be background, a backdrop that simply existed. Now it has stepped forward and I take it in differently. And I know I have to begin to say farewell. I don’t want to, but I can see that it’s already slipping away. I don’t know how long my own shoreline will remain.

What I’ll bring with me

I’ve started to redefine what safety means. Compulsively, I think about what I would need if the worst were to happen. If I had to flee. I make lists in my head and rearrange them. What really matters most, apart from being with the people I love? And maybe water.

1. A roof over my head. (That must be the most important, right?)

2. Warmth. (Or is that even more important than a roof?)

3. A pillow. (I wouldn’t be able to sleep otherwise.)

4. A blanket (for warmth and to hide under, or to mark some kind of boundary)

5. Medicine. (though mine aren’t vital. What happens to those who don’t have access to theirs when they have life-threatening deseases?)

6. Maybe a way to communicate. A phone?

7. ?

And then comes the rest, the harder part. If I can, what do I take from my life, my home? What matters most? The books? A painting? Or the chest. The chest great-aunt Olga carried across the Atlantic, full of hopes for a better life. It’s empty now, but it holds everything: the memories of my grandmother’s family, their dreams, their struggle, their perseverance. Can I tell this story without it, or do I need one thing to hold it all? My grandmother fled and didn’t see her home again for fifty years. What is lost in such a flight? Things, memories, or identity? Maybe all three. At once. Hard to pack into a suitcase.

What is safety when everything becomes uncertain? Is it a place? A feeling? A memory? A face, or a familiar embrace? If I have my family with me, if we have a roof over our heads and a blanket to wrap around us, maybe that’s enough.

And then my thoughts turn to those who are actually fleeing. To the children who have lost the ones they used to hold, who have no roof, no food, no blanket. What does it mean to say goodbye to “my world” when others never even had the chance to have one?

Powerlessness. Hopelessness.

No, the world is no longer mine.

What I’m leaving behind

The existential is one thing, the practical another. That I can grasp. If words can no longer make a difference, then bodies must. In my body, I feel new kinds of resistance. And I listen.

Slowly I’m saying goodbye to meetings that lead nowhere, jobs that exist only to keep a system running that I no longer believe in. To tasks without meaning. Goodbye to rush hour on the buses and the smell of bodies pressed together without connection. To the restlessness I once thought was ambition, but now wonder if it was a kind of escape.

I’m saying goodbye to the idea of revenge. That life will always give us new and better chances.

Farewell to the constant feeling that I should be better—more driven, stronger, more disciplined. To the cult of optimization that turned the body into a project rather than a home.

I’m saying goodbye to the feeling of always needing to hurry. To days broken into calendar slots and efficient windows. To the illusion that my worth lies in how much I manage to do. How little that says about how present I am.

I’m saying goodbye to the idea that independence means not needing anyone, to the belief that being alone is strong. To lives lived in parallel corridors—without contact, without meeting eyes.

I’m saying goodbye to things I never really wanted. To stress, to competition, to the endless comparing of lives and the illusion of control.

I’m saying goodbye to the belief that I can plan away uncertainty, that I can figure life out like an equation. To the disappointment when the future doesn’t follow my plans, and to the relief in understanding that it was never meant to.

The in-between

It’s a strange feeling to find yourself in the middle of a farewell while the world around you continues as if nothing has happened. As if everything were still stable. As if we hadn’t already crossed the threshold into another time.

I see people booking trips, planning their futures, saving for retirement—all the things that once felt natural, but now sound hollow to me. Like a ritual we’ve forgotten but still perform, as if it still worked.

How can they not see?

That’s probably what hurts the most. Not ignorance, but the unwillingness to stay with reality as it is, when it starts to chafe.

I’ve sat in so many rooms where everyone pretends nothing is happening, where the conversation shifts the moment it becomes uncomfortable. I’ve seen the eyes that turn away. It wasn’t nature I lost first—it was trust. Trust in our ability to stand together.

In the middle of all this, half of me still lives in the old. Because that’s how we are. We become through the eyes of others, through their words. I still belong, still want to belong, at least sometimes.

I live in the in-between now. Half of me is still there, in the old life of beaches, meetings with strict agendas, and rhythms my body instinctively learned to follow.

The other half is already here, where the world is changing and I need to prepare. It feels like saying goodbye to myself.

At the same time, I reach toward the one I haven’t yet fully met—the one who can live without a map, but with a compass in her chest.

The woman I used to be

I realize I’ve already said goodbye to things, without always knowing when it happened. To tastes I no longer choose. To comforts I once took for granted—the speed, the access, the freedom. But also to a version of myself.

The one who lived by the logic I was raised in. The one who was always pushing, always building, always on her way somewhere. Who measured her worth in motion, results, achievement. A self that followed a rhythm that wasn’t her own, that never asked if something felt true, only if it could be done.

I thought she was me. And maybe she was. A survival version of myself. An emergency exit. With a kind of loyalty to a system that never really saw me, but that I still wanted to prove myself to.

But slowly, she too is dissolving.

Who might I have been under other circumstances, and who do I need to become now? What do I need to learn to master? These are questions without clear answers yet, but my body answers the moment I ask.

Goodbye to ideals that were never going to make me happy. To circles that don’t allow what matters most. To relationships that only mirror someone I no longer recognize.

Another rhythm

I can feel another rhythm trying to take shape. A rhythm of breathing, rather than achieving. Of receiving, rather than controlling. I don’t yet know who I’m becoming in it, but I sense it’s someone who sees the world in completely new ways.

I live more now, in the middle of that uncertainty.

The breeze against my skin reminds me. I’m here. I’m alive. And I never want to step out of that feeling.

I’m discovering that stillness isn’t emptiness. That being here, in this place, isn’t less than being somewhere else. It’s more. Here is what’s alive, what’s near, what’s real. Here is what still holds.

What holds

We hold on to each other, carry our stories and memories, while learning to let go. We pack what matters most, in our hands and in our hearts, and hope it will be enough.

There’s something beautiful in how we move like one great body, searching for who we are now, how we belong.

There’s beauty in saying goodbye, in letting go. Memories are both comfort and burden. They hold moments that are no longer possible, but they also remind us of what was once real. That life carried us, that the world existed, that beauty truly did. It wasn’t a dream. It was real, when it was.

It’s no longer possible to save the world as we know it, only to slowly learn to live in it as it is. To say goodbye to what no longer holds.

To the world that was.
To the one I thought I was.

But not to life.
Not to love.
Not to what might still become.

Photo by Olga Barantseva.

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